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Dr. HARRY EMERSON FosDICK’s BOOK: 
THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 
A REVIEW 


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Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Book: 
“The Modern Use of the Bible” 


A REVIEW 


BY 


Jf 
I, M. HALDEMAN, D.D. 
Pastor, First Baptist Church, New York 


PHILADELPHIA 
THe SunDay SCHOOL TiMEs COMPANY 


CoPyRIGHT, 1925, BY 
THe Sunpay ScHoot Times CoMPANY 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


TO MY BELOVED SON 
HAROLD 


Whose promising life, not only as a 
Christian, but as a scientist, was 
cut off in the freshness of his years. 
In his last and cherished letter he 
wrote me these words: “lama firm 
believer. TI accept a whole Bible.” 





“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 


The book, “The Modern Use of the Bible,” is a 
collection of lectures delivered by Dr. Harry 
Emerson Fosdick before the Divinity School of 
Yale University. 

Its thesis is presented with all the mode of 
final authority, the unmistakable accent of 
“agreed scholarship,” and the emphasis of a con- 
clusion from which, it should seem, there could be 
no appeal. 

Dr. Fosdick analyzes the Bible with absolute 
assurance. 

He speaks with unhesitating frankness concern- 
ing its origin. 


Origin of the Bible Immature and Childlike 


Instead of coming direct from God and bearing 
the unmistakable stamp of the divine mind, the 
Bible originated in primitive and childlike ideas. 

On page 11 he says: 

“A new approach to the Bible has been forced 
upon us. No longer can we think of the Book as 
on a level, no longer read its maturer messages 
back into its earlier sources. We know now that 
every idea in the Bible started from primitive and 
childlike origins.” 

7 


5 A REVIEW OF Dr. FosDICK’s Book 


Miracles Incredible 


The miracles of the Bible are incredible, the 
modern mind will not accept them. 


Citing a list of miracles which he affirms con- 
tradict modern astronomy, modern biology, mod- 
ern physics and modern medicine, Dr. Fosdick 
tells us: 

“They (educated men) find it hard to use one 
set of mental presuppositions and categories in 
every other realm of life and another set in relig- 
ion. They have to shift their mental gear too sud- 
denly when they turn from their ordinary in- 
tellectual processes to the strange ways of think- 
ing that the Bible contains” (p. 35). 


The God of the Old Testament 
Shocks the Modern Mind 


To Dr. Fosdick the God of the Old Testament 
is not the God who “‘inhabiteth eternity,” he is a 
local, limited and tribal God, set up on the plane 
of surrounding nations. 

This God is pictured to us as a cruel and blood- 
thirsty God, no higher in his moral sense than the 
people whose crude and racial imagination in- 
vented him, 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 9 


A proof is cited in the “ruthless extermination 
of the Amalekites—‘both man and woman, infant 
and suckling,’ ”’ commanded by this God; and while 
recognizing the shock it produces to modern sensi- 
bility and the indignation it must arouse, at the 
same time, Dr. Fosdick becomes conservative to- 
ward it in endeavoring to define it, not so much 
as an act of downright inhumanity when judged 
by moral standards, as the limitation of a tribal 
God confined by his genesis within a limited field 
of action. 

He draws further attention to the low plane on 
the part of this God, who as he says: 

“Out of pure caprice, at a wayside inn started 
to kill a man on sight and was only estopped by 
the quick action of the man’s wife in circumciz- 
ing her son” (p. 15). 

Such a God he is sure “was not a God with 
whom close communion would be desirable.” 

The unequal impulses and unbalanced sense of 
right and wrong in the Old Testament are clearly 
demonstrated, he thinks, in that this God “‘equally 
hates David’s sin with Bathsheba and David’s 
taking of a census” (p. 28). 

It was only, we are told, as the prophets got 
away from this primitive, national and tribal idea 


10 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


of God that they “widened their sense of moral 
obligation.” 

To have held on to this Bible idea of God (the 
inference is a fair one) would have made them as 
immoral as the immoral Bible God himself. 


The Text of the Bible a Framework of 
Shifting Human Experience 


When we turn to an examination of the Old 
Testament construction we find it as stratified as 
the earth itself. 

Each era in which the distinctive parts were 
written bring evidential witness to the growth of 
the human mind, its steady emergence from im- 
maturity, the loosening of the shackles of super- 
stition, ignorance and tradition, a larger moral 
concept, a more sane, a better and kindlier vision 
of God. 

“The framework” (a word used throughout the 
book to indicate the text) through which the ideas 
of the Bible proceed has the color, the strength 
and weakness of its times, is not to be taken seri- 
ously, that is to say, not authoritatively, and is to 
be tolerated only in so far as it gives passage to 
soul experience. 

The experience may be expressed in forms 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE’”’ 11 


which in themselves are untrue in fact, contradict- 
ed both by science and history, but in so far as 
the experiences are true, real, soul experiences, 
there need be no quarrel with them. 


Science and history may say, “these forms, 
these assignments of cause cannot be defended, 
but the experiences they so faultily endeavor to 
express are true. The miracle may be rejected as 
obviously without foundation, we need not bother 
to believe it at all, but we may accept without 
restraint a human experience which through all 
the blunder and crudity, actual superstition and, 
even, downright falsehood, seeks to prove the 
soul’s reach after truth.” 


It is here we have the substance of Dr. Fos- 
dick’s book and the principle upon which it is 
written. 


From the beginning (it is the suggestion he 
gives us) there has been an ethical urge in man. 
You may, if you like, call this ethical force or 
tendency a deposit of divinity, an elemental mani- 
festation of God in humanity. This ethical im- 
pulse has been moving man upward toward spir- 
itual apprehension of, and an intensive desire to 
serve, God. 


12 A REVIEW oF DR. FOospDIcK’s Book 


It has expressed itself in this book we call the 
Bible. 

Always the experiences have been essentially 
true, the forms through which they passed have 
been temporary, finding their character in the 
times out of which they were evolved. In giving 
emphasis to this inner sentiment, statements have 
been made that are scientifically false and his- 
torically untrue. 

We have an example of this in the belief about 
demons. 

To modern thought there are no such things as 
demons. They do not exist. They never did ex- 
ist, but men used the idea of demons, of evil 
spirits, to account for the hindrances they found 
every day in their spiritual quest. These hin- 
drances are just as true now as then. Every man 
who seeks to climb up spiritually knows them— 
but they are not demons, and every modern man 
knows they are not; they are simply the reactions 
that go with the basic animal constitution of man. 
We can afford therefore to dismiss belief in 
demons, but the spiritual and personal experiences 
are true and we may discern them underneath the 
superstition and ignorance that invents demons 
and spirits to explain the conflict. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE’’ 13 


We are to deal with miracles, with historically 
false elements in the Bible, in the same way. 

They were the best means to express either the 
causation of evil or the inspiration for and en- 
couragement of the good. 

When we repudiate all this temporary form of 
the Bible, thus demonstrate and prove that these 
portions of the Bible are not inspired, we do not 
(Dr. Fosdick says we do not) destroy the Bible; 
on the contrary (Dr. Fosdick says so), we more 
fully establish it. We emphasize its authority (to 
the modern mind, the mind that rejects miracles) 
because under all may be seen the abiding truth 
of experience, and this experience with all its 
tergiversation and crudity and at times utter ab- 
surdity, this persistent ethic urge ever ascending, 
finds its culmination in Christ. 

In Him the God who little by little has been re- 
vealing himself in man, manifesting himself even 
in the scientific fables and historical misrepre- 
sentations, this God is found in Christ as the ex- 
pression and proof of the evolution of God in man, 
in all the sweep and surge of supreme spiritual 
consciousness. 

It is for us in this day to take the life of Christ 
as he lived it, sun ourselves in the quickening 


14 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BOOK 


warmth of it, absorb his principles and precepts, 
follow his ideals and rejoice in a book so true, in 
spite of all its errors and false concepts both of 
God and man; so true that as we read it, learn to 
distinguish between the true and the false in its 
content, surrender to the living spiritual force in 
it, we shall find ourselves conscious that we are 
in Christ and Christ is in us. 

Repudiating this “framework” of the Bible, its 
mere form and phrase, we may be delivered from 
any necessity of coming to grips with either 
science or history; and when the scientist would 
come and with rude hand take this Bible away 
from us, we may say: 

“Stand aside, we have no conflict with you at 
all. Your objections, if you insist on them, are 
childish; this Bible is not built on mere form, on 
rigid collocation of terms, on narrow and useless 
literalisms, but on the great truth that man has 
been steadily approaching to what Christ is, to 
what Christ shows man may attain. We take this 
Book at its true value as a progressive revelation 
both of God and man, find it more and more 
authoritative to our inner sense in proportion as 
we reject the outer and temporary shell; in pro- 
portion as we refuse to be bound by its static 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 15 


thought forms and yield to its spiritual call.” 

“What is permanent in Christianity (we are 
told) is not mental frameworks but abiding expe- 
riences that phrase and rephrase themselves in 
successive generations’ ways of thinking” (p. 
108). 

And this, as Dr. Fosdick presents it, teaches the 
struggle of the divine element in the soul, but at 
the same time throws the Bible in its written form 
into an unqualified discard as neither textually in- 
spired nor authoritatively infallible. 

While you are rejoicing in this beautiful and 
heroic struggle of the soul and are moved with 
admiration at the wonderful way in which the 
Bible is supposed to record it; while you are ap- 
parently gaining everything for humanity, you 
are losing your Bible as you have been accustomed 
to read and revere it. You are getting an alto- 
gether new Bible—so far as the Old Testament is 
to be considered, a Bible none of the Apostles of 
Christ knew, and it may be said, Scriptures Jesus 
Christ himself (if we are to believe the speech 
recorded of him) never knew. 

And this is the result Dr. Fosdick is seeking to 
achieve. 

He is seeking to give us a new Bible. 


16 A REVIEW OF DR. FospDICcK’s Book 


A Twentieth Century Bible. 

For the Bible handed down to us by the 
triumphant spiritual faith of our fathers, a faith 
that believed in the full and textual authority 
of the Book, he would substitute this modern 
Bible which his genius and enthusiasm evoke. 

The New Testament is built in the same detach- 
able and movable framework as the Old. 

It is acceptable in form only as it gives proce- 
dure to experiences that can be verified in the 
soul. 

It matters little how many incredible miracle 
narratives may crowd its pages, and Dr. Fosdick 
announces they are there, and he does not believe 
them, he says: “I find some of the miracle-narra- 
tives of Scripture historically incredible” (p. 164), 
—it matters little that these incredible miracle 
narratives are there; the test must be neither 
scientific nor historical, it must be the inner test 
of the soul; in short the value of the record de- 
pends entirely upon the response of consciousness 
in the soul. 

When the superstructure of miracles is set 
aside, when statements utterly and hopelessly un- 
verifiable in scientific and historic content are re- 
jected, we may be thankful the psychic fact re- 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 17 


mains. The coat may, indeed, be shoddy, but the 
body underneath remains, and that is the essen- 
tial thing, that is the real value. 


It may be quite easy to unravel the text and 
show its contradictions, but as the soul’s upreach 
is made bare to the gaze, we need not be troubled 
that the text itself cannot abide. 


The Gospel Narratives Largely Pure Fiction 


Dr. Fosdick believes the Gospel records, spe- 
cially in their miracle statement and personal 
exaggerations, may be explained by the operation 
of a principle he defines as “heightening,” as 
“addition.” 

His proposition is that the nearer we get to 
first-hand documentary sources the fewer miracles 
there are, the farther we get away from these 
sources and get into tradition and report, the more 
the miracles multiply, become more elaborate and 
startling. 

As an illustration he cites the case of Xavier. 

In Xavier’s letters and the first-hand accounts 
of him by his companions, no miracles are ascrib- 
ed to him; but, when his biographies are written, 
the pages are literally filled with miracles, and 
miracles of the most amazing and complex sort. 


18 A REVIEW oF DR. FOSDICK’s Book 


Dr. Fosdick applies this by calling our atten- 
tion to certain specified statements in the Gospels. 

In Mark (assumed to be the earliest of the 
Gospels) there are no “birth stories”; that is to 
say, nothing whatever about the virgin birth. 

You get this in Matthew and Luke in full detail. 

In Mark, only Jesus walks on the water. 

In Matthew, Peter tries it, too. 

In Mark, a fig tree denounced in the evening is 
wilted the next morning. 

In the later record the fig tree is cursed in the 
morning and immediately withers. 

Mark records no other marvels at the cruci- 
fixion than the rending of the temple veil. 

Matthew adds—the resurrection of many 
bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep. 

In Mark, at Gadara, Jesus heals one demoniac. 

In Matthew he heals two. 

Dr. Fosdick says: 

‘When we compare Mark and Luke we get the 
same impression of heightened effect and added 
detail. In Luke, though not in Mark, are the 
stories of the virgin birth and of the angelic ap- 
parition to the shepherds. In Mark, where ‘one 
of them that stood by drew his sword, and smote 
the servant of the high priest, and struck off his 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 19 


ear,’ no miracle is recorded. In Luke, however, 
the ear is restored—the only example in Scripture 
of the restoration of an amputated member.” 

“Luke is especially rich in dramatic additions 
to the narrative.” 


“In Mark the story of the descending dove at 
Jesus’ baptism is easily interpreted as a “sym- 
bolical description of a spiritual experience, Luke 
makes the event indubitably physical—‘in a bodily 
form, as a dove’” (pp. 147-8). 

When we turn from the Synoptic Gospels and 
compare them with the later Gospel of John we 
are face to face with this “heightening of the 
miraculous element.” 

In John alone you have turning of water into 
wine, curing of a man born blind, raising of Laz- 
arus from the dead after he had been four days 
entombed. 


We are exhorted to consider such facts as this, 
“increasingly well known to thoughtful minds,” 
and find it evident that “we would better come to 
serious grips with the problem that is here pre- 
sented.” 

We are reminded that, “In the Old Testament 
as well as in the New appears this same tendency 


20 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’s Book 


to heighten marvels as one retreats from first- 
hand documents.” 

In plain language, “heightening for effect,’ and 
“added detail,” signify that over-zealous disciples, 
enthusiastic biographers, like those of Xavier, 
wishing to exalt the name and fame of their 
Master, invented these amplifications, these de- 
tails, and thus turned the Gospels into a manu- 
factured fabric largely made out of the whole 
cloth. 

If, therefore, we are staggered, if our scien- 
tific sense, our modern mind, should balk at a mir- 
acle such as water turned to wine by fiat, or the 
raising of Lazarus four days dead, we need only 
to apply the principle of “‘heightening,” of ‘‘addi- 
tion,” and, seeing in the stories the manifest evi- 
dence of invention, feel ourselves at liberty to re- 
ject them, not only as unscientific, without his- 
toric evidence, but as the content of falsified 
records, as unwarranted fiction. 

By this method it is evident we may easily get 
rid of some of the sayings of Jesus, sayings that 
are hard to reconcile with the proposition that he 
was merely a man, stupendous sayings in which 
he flatly affirms pre-existence and co-equality with 
God, claims such as only a fool or a madman 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE’ 21 


could make if he were, indeed, no more than a 
naturally begotten and born man. 


Admit the “heightening for effect,” the ‘‘addi- 
tion of detail,” admit that these sayings were put 
into his mouth by exuberant, but unwise, disci- 
ples, and you are relieved from bearing in your 
mind unbelievable things, and at the same time 
deliver our Lord from carrying a lot of baggage 
that impedes, rather than impels, the movement 
of his story. 

On this basis of “heightening,” and “addition,” 
invention, fiction, unqualified falsehood and thor- 
oughly immoral construction, we may go back and 
listen to Jesus, as has been suggested, “over the 
head of his reporters.” 


That is to say, listen to the Jesus whom our 
modern mind may conceive. 


That is to say, further: 

Whenever Jesus makes a claim or assertion 
which invalidates or contradicts the testimony of 
the modern mind concerning him and thus puts 
him in conflict with science and history, we are 
at full liberty to affirm he never made any such 
claim, he never made any such assertion, the lan- 
guage is not his, it is the language of his alto- 


22 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


gether unreliable reporters, his disciples, his un- 
trustworthy biographers. 

On this principle of “heightening,” of “addi- 
tion,” we may safely assure ourselves that the 
miracles accredited to him he never performed, 
the measureless claims quoted as his he never 
made. 

What a perfect weapon this puts into the hand 
of the larger minded modernist who finds himself 
forced to deal with that fundamentalist type of 
Christian who seeks to defend our Lord’s name 
and reputation by bringing forward the testimony 
of his miracles and personal claims! No matter 
how eloquent a Fundamentalist may wax over 
these evidences that Jesus was more than man, 
that he was very God, piling up literalism after 
literalism, actual quotations of Scripture, crush- 
ing arguments, as he supposes, against all oppo- 
nents, leaving them actually nothing to say; all 
the man who believes in the modern use of the 
Bible has to do is to restrain his own spirit, and 
quietly and calmly answer: 

“My good friend, I admire your sincerity, but 
it is based altogether upon a lack of advanced 
knowledge. I am under bonds to tell you that all 
this evidence you bring in behalf of the Jesus of 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 23 


the Gospels is entirely worthless, the miracles re- 
ported as his he never performed, and all those 
terrific, irresponsible claims to deity he never 
imagined, much less made; they have been 
‘heightened for effect’ and ‘added’ for detail. I 
am sorry to spoil your oration, but truth and ac- 
curate knowledge demand that I speak.” 

What can a man do in face of that, a man who 
all along has believed in the integrity of the 
record? What can he do but heave a sigh, become 
quiescent and wholly surrendered before this ‘“‘ad- 
vanced” knowledge, and in the presence of these 
genii of modernism, “heightening for effect,’ and 
“addition” of detail, watch the figure of the Jesus 
whom he sought to defend fade away into thinnest 
mist and finally disappear into the realm of a base- 
less fiction? 

On this principle of “heightening,” and ‘“addi- 
tion,” we get the story of Bethlehem’s star. 

It is intimated that the cosmology of the earlier 
centuries was inextricably mixed up with astrol- 
ogy, and the disciples under this pervasion of in- 
fluence and desiring greatly to enhance the won- 
der of the natal night found it easy “to heighten 
for effect,” and “added” this brilliant detail. 

Dr. Fosdick has no place for “birth stories.” 


24 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


He does not openly deny the virgin birth in this 
book, but he has put himself on record concerning 
it as a useless biological miracle. It can be ac- 
counted for as a story only on the ground of this 
“heightening for effect,” this “‘addition” for de- 
tail. 


Dr. Fosdick’s Definition of “Vicarious” 
in the Sacrifice of Christ 


Dr. Fosdick believes in the vicarious sacrifice 
of Christ. 

But he believes in it, not in the way the New 
Testament textually teaches it: that is to say, 
Christ as a sin-bearer, a substitute, “‘made sin for 
us,” enduring death as a penalty for sin. 

He does not believe the death of Christ had any 
such character as that. 

He believes in vicarious sacrifice as illustrated 
in the act of David Livingstone, who expatriated 
himself and gave himself up in whole-hearted sur- 
render to the savages of Darkest Africa that he 
might bring a blessing to their unillumined souls; 
the act of self-effacement that led Father Damien 
to cast his lot amid the helpless lepers, share their 
foul disease, their suffering and the horrors of 
their death; the principle of self-denial that led 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 25 


Florence Nightingale to forego all the comfort, 
the ease and security of home that, amid the hor- 
rors of the battlefield she might minister to the 
wounded and the dying. 

You will look in vain through “The Modern 
Use of the Bible,” to find any suggestion that our 
Lord came into the world to fulfil the typical sac- 
rifices of the Old Testament, or such direct 
prophecies as the Fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, 
where he is represented as a lamb to slaughter 
led, as an ordained substitute bearing the iniquity 
and penal suffering judicially due to others. 

Nowhere is there a shadow of a hint that he 
“bare our sins in his own body on the tree’; or, 
that the blood of Christ “cleanseth us from all 
sin’; nor the dynamic declaration that we are 
“sanctified through the offering of the body of 
Jesus Christ once for all’; and that “‘by one offer- 
ing he hath perfected for ever them that are 
(thus) sanctified’; no quotation of Paul’s im- 
mense statement of the motive that led to the 
incarnation of Christ, the great objective purpose 
for which he came into the world, that clean, 
clear-cut statement of Paul in Hebrews 2:9: 

“We see Jesus, who was made a little lower 
than the angels for the suffering of death . . . 


26 A REVIEW OF DR, FOSDICK’S Book 


that he by the grace of God should taste death for 
every man.” 

Vicarious suffering, the vicarious suffering of 
Christ on the cross, as Dr. Fosdick teaches it, as 
his book proposes it, must not be considered out- | 
side the category of the Livingstones, the Father 
Damiens and the Florence Nightingales. 


Dr. Fosdick Does Not Believe 
Christ Rose from the Dead 


He says so plainly. 

“TI do not believe in the resurrection of the 
flesh” (p. 98). 

The Scripture record declares Jesus rose in the 
flesh, so actually in the flesh that he commanded 
his disciples to handle him and see that he was not 
a spirit, a mere ghost, but flesh and bones; so 
actually, according to the record, he did what Dr. 
Fosdick confesses “puzzles” him,—he took broiled 
fish and an honeycomb, “and did eat before them.” 

Listen to the Lord’s own very words in their 
full connection: 

“Behold my hands and my feet (and why should 
he show them his hands, but that they might see 
the print where the nails went in; and why did 
he show them his feet but that they might see 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 27 


where the nails were driven crunchingly 
through?), that it is I myself (just as they had 
always known him and looked upon him): 
handle me, and see (surely handling and 
seeing signify flesh as an objective both to 
touch and vision) ; for a spirit hath not flesh and 
bones, as ye see me have.” (And what is that, what 
does that mean if language has any meaning at 
all? What does it mean, what is it but the 
straight, authoritative, headquarters statement 
that he was not a mere spirit, an impalpable 
ghost, but just as he said, there before them in 
flesh, very flesh and very bones?) 

According to the record, therefore, the resurrec- 
tion of Christ was a resurrection of the fiesh. 

Since Dr. Fosdick does not believe in the resur- 
rection of the flesh he does not believe Jesus Christ 
rose in the flesh, and as the New Testament knows 
no other resurrection of Christ than resurrection 
in the flesh, then Dr. Fosdick does not believe in 
the resurrection of Christ according to the New 
Testament record, the record which says beyond 
all possibility of dispute that he did rise in the 
flesh. 

Dr. Fosdick must stand convicted, therefore, by 


28 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


his own words and this record of the New Testa- 
ment as denying the resurrection of Christ. 

Since he does not believe in the resurrection of 
the flesh both in respect to Christ and to the be- 
liever in Christ, he does not believe in the literal — 
resurrection of the Christian dead. 

It is true, Paul believed in the resurrection of 
the flesh, both the resurrection of Christ and the 
resurrection of the Christian. 

He sets forth his belief in that great chapter, 
the fifteenth of the first epistle to the Corinthians. 

Paul believed our Lord rose from the dead in 
the body in which he died. 

He says, not only that Christ died, but that he 
was buried; thus drawing our attention to that 
which was dead—the body, and the body alone, 
and therefore that which alone could be raised up 
again and made alive. 

His body we are told in the Gospel was in the 
grave till the third day, and it was the open tomb 
and the absence of the body that appealed to the 
disciples, and carried to them the evidence of 
resurrection. 

Paul says after our Lord was buried: He rose 
again. 

What relation can the emphasis on burial have 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 29 


but the intensive emphasis that it was the body 
which rose from the dead, rose from the place of 
burial? 

If Paul does not mean he rose in the body to 
which he draws this particular attention that it 
was buried, then Paul is guilty of playing with 
words and connection of words to deceive. 

But Paul is not trying to deceive. 

He means absolutely that Jesus Christ rose in 
the body that had been nailed to the cross, and 
by that resurrection robbed death of its power 
and the grave of its prey. 

Indeed, the Apostle makes the bodily resurrec- 
tion of Christ overwhelmingly important. 

He says if Christ did not rise preaching is vain. 

Deny the bodily resurrection of Christ and you 
make the preaching of Christ of no more value 
than empty sound, of no more value than shifting 
sand and blowing winds. 

This Fifteenth Chapter that has been as a 
Gibraltar of evidence to the Church of Christ in 
the past, the rock-ribbed testimony upon which 
many stand today, look at the silent faces of their 
dead, and across their tears get the light that 
shines out of his empty tomb, the light that breaks 
across those tears as though they were a prism, 


30 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


and turns the anguish of despair into the radiant 
arch of hope till it spans the grave, that monu- 
mental chapter of Apostolic faith has no meaning 
to Dr. Fosdick, it can have no meaning to the 
students for the ministry who accept his lectures, 
and can have no meaning to those who would 
make his “The Modern Use of the Bible’ a text- 
book, and may, according to Dr. Fosdick’s logic, 
be cut out of the Epistle without damage to the 
New Testament. 

To Dr. Fosdick, immortality is not identified 
with the resurrection of the body. That: idea, how- 
ever it might be worked out from the Hebrew 
premise about the body was, finally, due to the 
influence of Zoroastrianism during the exile. 

“During the Exile Zoroastrianism became the 
mold into which the Hebrew expectations of life 
beyond death were run” (p. 100). 

He then adds: 

“A great deal of water has flowed under the 
bridge since the days when those first disciples 
thought of life everlasting in Zoroastrian terms. 
Historically the major agency in crowding out the 
older ways of thinking has been the Greek philoso- 
phy. Its basic premise was the evil of the physi- 
cal body and the desirability of the soul’s escape 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE’’ SL 


from its fleshly imprisonment to the realm of 
eternal spirit. It did not want a bodily resurrec- 
tion; it wanted to escape from the body alto- 
gether” (p. 101). 

He quotes Origen as one of the long succession 
of Christians who, “believing earnestly in immor- 
tality, have not associated it with the resurrection 
of the flesh.” 

Dr. Fosdick does not believe in immortality as 
related to the flesh. He identifies immortality 
with everlasting life. In preaching everlasting 
life—the continuance of the soul or spirit—he 
assumes he is preaching immortality. 

The truth is “immortality” and “everlasting 
life’ are distinct things. 

Everlasting life according to Scripture is a spe- 
cific gift of the grace of God to those who accept 
Jesus Christ as crucified Saviour and risen Re- 
deemer, and includes continued existence (that 
which belongs to all souls) ; but immortality in the 
Scripture use of the word signifies, always, and 
only, a deathless, incorruptible body (a blessing 
and benediction provided for the Christian be- 
liever alone). 

Immortality to Dr. Fosdick is nothing more 
than continued existence of the soul; it is the logic 


a4 A REVIEW OF Dr. FOSDICK’S Book 


of his disbelief in the resurrection of the flesh, 
and is therefore the state and condition of immor- 
tality which he now applies to our Lord. 


Since Dr. Fosdick does not believe in the bodily | 
resurrection of Christ he has nothing more to say 
about it than that it ‘‘puzzles” him. 

He says: 

“We may not know what to make of narratives 
about his eating fish after his resurrection, pass- 
ing through closed doors, and offering his hands 
and feet to the inquiring touch of Thomas” (p. 
164). 

He questions how far that record is due to the 

“Hebrew necessity of associating continued life 
with a physical resurrection.” 
- Then he quotes from a psychic investigator as 
on a “truer track” than that revealed in the Gos- 
pel record and deduces the possibility of a psychic 
resurrection which, if we keep strictly to philo- 
logical necessity, is that grotesque, philological 
contradiction in terms—mere soul resurrection. 

But he has nothing to say about the effect of 
the reported bodily resurrection of Christ. 


There is no attempted explanation of the indis- 
putable fact that from the hour of this alleged 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 33 


resurrection the disciples, who forsook the Lord 
when he was arrested, fled in a whirlwind of cow- 
ardly panic and stood at last, shivering and piti- 
fully helpless in the crowd that witnessed and 
enjoyed the agony of his lingering death—there 
is no reference to the sudden transfiguring effect 
this story of the resurrection had on these same 
disciples. 

There is no explanation of the dynamically 
demonstrable fact that coincidentally with the 
proclamation of this physical resurrection, these 
crushed, cowed, vanquished and terror-stricken 
disciples went forth with the courage of lions, 
grew eloquent with an eloquence which never be- 
fore had so anointed human lips and inspired the 
human tongue, counted it a distinguished honor 
to endure affliction and to die for him whom they 
believed had triumphed over death and the grave; 
went forth to suffer and to die, persisting with 
their latest breath and in their last agony that 
they were eye-witnesses and that this record 
which “puzzles” the man of modern mind was 
true, and true in all its details. 

But even though he denies the resurrection of 
Christ, Dr. Fosdick believes He is alive. 


34 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


He says: 

“We believe that he is not dead but is risen; 
that we have a living Lord.” 

On what ground does Dr. Fosdick believe that? 

Will he say he believes it because he feels the 
life of Christ in him? 

That is personal, experimental knowledge—per- 
haps. 

But a Mahometan might say that of Mahomet if 
he sought to prove he was alive. 

A follower of Mrs. Eddy might say that of the 
inventor of Christian Science. 

Experimental evidence is good, but it is good 
only as it is corroborative of direct evidence. 

The disciples did not hand out their experi- 
mental evidence to the world, they gave direct 
evidence. They gave the evidence of eyesight. 
They gave historic fact. 

But where is this Christ whom Dr. Fosdick is 
sure is alive? 

He confesses he knows nothing about the future 
life. 

He says: 

“Personally, I do not pretend to know the de- 
tails of the future life” (p. 102). 

Future life begins after death. He has no actual 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 35 


knowledge then of what takes place after death. 
He has therefore no actual knowledge about 
Christ since He died,—no actual, direct, evidential 
knowledge of Christ whatever. 

All he really knows according to his own testi- 
mony is that Christ’s body of flesh never rose 
from the dead and therefore according to the law 
obtaining in a physical body it corrupted and turn- 
ed to dust. 

And this conclusion that is inevitable from the 
premise of the non-resurrection of the body is in 
direct contradiction to, and is contradicted by, the 
anticipative declaration and assurance of our Lord 
speaking through the mouth of the Psalmist; as 
it is written: 

“Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell (in Hades, 
the underworld of the disembodied dead) ; neither 
wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corrup- 
tion.” | 

That in speaking of ‘“‘corruption,” the pre-ex- 
istent Lord is referring to his body, his flesh 
after death, is demonstrated by the comment of 
the Holy Spirit speaking through the lips of the 
Apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost. 


The Apostle says: 
“He (David who wrote the Sixteenth Psalm) 


36 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


seeing this before spake of the resurrection of 
Christ, that his soul was not left in hell (Hades), 
neither his flesh did see corruption” (Acts 2:31). 


Dr. Fosdick Has Nothing to Say 
of the Priesthood of Christ 


It is a striking fact that Dr. Fosdick has noth- 
ing to say about the priesthood of Christ. Not 
once does he speak of him as a priest. He ignores 
that splendid phrase of Paul in the eighth chapter 
of the Hebrews: 

“Now of the things which we have spoken this 
is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is 
set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty 
in the heavens.” 

He never says a word of the wonderful way in 
which Paul compares the efficiency of the priest- 
hood of Christ with the inefficiency of the priest- 
hood of Aaron on the day of Atonement. On that 
day when Aaron went within the veil, into the 
Holy of Holies, he could not sit down. He must 
stand. He could remain only long enough to 
sprinkle the blood upon the Mercy Seat, and must 
hasten out lest he die; but Paul tells us, Christ en- 
tered into Heaven with his own blood and sat 
down on the very throne of God, and now abides 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 37 


there as the ever-living, interceding priest for his 
people. 

Dr. Fosdick never quotes this assurance and 
exhortation of Paul: 

“Having therefore, brethren (he is writing to 
Hebrew Christians), boldness to enter into the 
holiest by the blood of Jesus, 

“By a new and living way, which he hath conse- 
crated (opened) for us, through the veil, that is 
to say, his flesh; 

‘“‘And having an high priest over the house of 
God (the Church) ; 

“Let us draw near with a true heart in full 
assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled 
from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10: 19-22). 

To Dr. Fosdick, the Epistle to the Hebrews has 
no meaning. 

He has no concept of Christ as a risen, glorified, 
immortal priest at all. 

And this is of absolute logic. 

Priesthood is based on sacrificial death, on 
vicarious, substitutional death, on death that is 
penal and judicial. 

The typical sacrifice to which Paul refers is the 
sacrifice of the day of Atonement; but Dr. Fos- 
dick does not see the death of Christ as an act of 


38 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


atonement. He does not know Christ as the Anti- 
type of the Levitical sacrifices. He speaks of 
them in relation to Christ and the Cross in a way 
that has all the accent of indifferentism and final 
repudiation. 

He says: 

“The Cross of Christ, . . . has been run 
into thought-forms associated with old animal 
sacrifices” (p. 230). 

All the wonder, the glory, the cornfort, offered 
to the Christian in the thought that in yonder 
Heaven is one tempted and tried in all points as 
we are, yet proven to be without sin, a splendid 
victor, triumphing over all assault, doing so in 
our name and in our behalf; who is there as our 
Advocate, there to pray for us, to hear our con- 
fessions and give absolution for failures by the 
way and cleansing for better service; there as our 
Representative, always presenting us in the per- 
fection and beauty of his own holiness before God 
the Father, presenting us as the children of the 
Father; there to take our prayers and offer them 
to the Father in the virtue of his atoning death; 
there as our life and unfailing resource, as our 
Forerunner, pledge to God and pledge to us that 
some day we shall enter Heaven, be with him, 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE’ 39 


where he is, and be like him,—of all this Dr. Fos- 
dick says nothing and believes nothing. 

And how could he? 

How can he know anything of a risen, immortal 
Christ as high priest when (according to his state- 
ment) Christ has ceased to exist in the flesh? 

What can you expect other than silence on the 
part of Dr. Fosdick concerning the priesthood of 
Christ? 

The Christ he portrays is only a fragmentary 
Christ, a bodiless Christ, a ghost Christ, not the 
Christ of victory over death and the grave, and 
whose empty tomb gives a sin-stained, sorrow- 
smitten world a gleam of hope; not the Christ 
who has carried an immortal manhood to the 
throne of the universe and is seated there as 
the eternal incarnation and visibility of the other- 
wise unseen God—nay—the Christ Dr. Fosdick 
portrays—is not the Christ of the New Testament 
record. 


Dr. Fosdick Does Not Believe Christ Will Appear 
a Second Time to This World 


The proposition that Christ did not rise in the 
flesh necessitates the proposition that he will not 
come again in the flesh. 


40 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


Dr. Fosdick says he will not. 

“T do not believe in the physical return of 
Jesus” (p. 104). 

This denies the statement made by the Lord 
himself. 

“Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting 
on the right hand of power, and coming in the 
clouds of heaven” (Matt. 26: 64). 

This statement of the Lord makes it impossible 
to turn that Coming into the invisible coming of 
the Holy Spirit, or into a mere spiritual coming 
of the Lord himself; the language in all the in- 
tegrity of honest intention signifies a Son of man 
in the flesh, coming in the flesh. 

This is an issue between Dr. Fosdick and the 
Lord himself and is a charge the Lord has not 
told the truth about his Second Coming. 

Dr. Fosdick, of course, has no thought of mak- 
ing such a direct charge against the Son of God. 
The only way, however, in which he can escape 
the full meaning of his attitude is to take the 
ground that the Lord never used the words re- 
ported of him, they were put in his mouth by the 
operation of this serviceable principle of “height- 


ening for effect,’ by this expansive power of 
“‘addition,” 


“Tr MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” Aj 


But over against Dr. Fosdick’s plain and open 
denial of the physical return of our Lord, the 
denial that he will come again in the flesh, there 
is this terrible and accusatory statement of the 
Apostle John, which, when rendered literally, 
reads as follows: 

“Many deceivers are entered into the world, 
who confess not that Jesus Christ is coming in 
the flesh. This is a deceiver and AN ANTI- 
CHRIST” (2 John 7). 


The God of Nature and the God of Love 


Dr. Fosdick is full of sharp criticism, not to 
say indignation, against the barbarism and cruelty 
of the God of the Old Testament. 

In what way, I would ask, will he apologize for 
the God (transcendental or immanent) who, at 
least, “permitted” the barbarity, the anguish and 
woe of the recent earthquake in Japan; the God 
who, having all power, allows millions to die of 
pestilence till they learn through piled up holo- 
causts the best hygiene, and other millions to 
starve with torturing famine in repeated experi- 
ence through the slow-moving ages till they learn 
the secrets of successful agriculture, and even 
then allows mildew and blasting, caterpillar, or 


42 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’sS Book 


amazingly ingenious, poisonous bug; or when that 
is not sufficiently effective in destruction, allows 
cloud burst or cyclonic winds to ruin the harvest 
of orchard, of vineyard, and of field? 

To call this “nature” and leave it at that, may 
be scientific, it may be (as it is) historic, but it is 
scarcely satisfactory, and certainly does not re- 
spond to the so-called upreach which from the 
beginning, we are told, has been moving Godward 
in man. 

Dr. Fosdick believes in a God of love, of mercy 
and peace; he believes in a God of life, life flow- 
ing out in fulness and health. All this accentuates 
itself in the premise that he is not far from every 
one of us; that in him we live and move and have 
our being; that he is at rest in his world and at 
rest in us, the worst as well as the best of us. 

How will Dr. Fosdick accredit all this character 
to the God of nature? 

How will he reconcile a world full of hate with 
a God of love? 

How will he reconcile a world full of war with 
a God of peace? 

How will he reconcile a world full of unchang- 
ing cruelty with a God of mercy? 

How will he reconcile a world crammed, stained 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 43 


and fever-smitten with sin, sin that finds its fresh 
initial whenever a child is begotten, whenever a 
child is conceived, how will he reconcile all this 
with a God of holiness? 

How will he reconcile a world where the sov- 
ereign forces are sickness, disease and death, with 
a God who is the source of life and health and has 
all power? 

Is there any man on earth today (let us say, the 
average man) who, had he the power, would not 
exercise it in behalf of suffering humanity? 

Is there one who would not dry the tear, give 
surcease to sorrow, rebuke disease, banish pain 
and put an end to death? 

What shall be said then? 

I ask, is it illogical, is it unscientific, to say such 
a sentiment on the part of the average man would 
seem to show that he is more compassionate, more 
full of mercy than the God of nature? 

Is it illogical, is it unscientific, to say the fail- 
ure of the God of nature to respond to this senti- 
ment in the average man is as much a shock to 
that man as it may be to the sentiment of the man 
of “modern mind,” when he reads the record of 
a so-called barbarous and tribal God in the pages 
of the Old Testament? 


44 A REVIEW OF Dr. FOSDICK’s BooK 


If the God of nature wrote it, would it be illog- 
ical or unexpected to discover some of the char- 
acteristics there of a God who hates sin, who will 
by no means clear the guilty and in the Scripture 
simply affirms what he carries out in historic ex- 
perience that those who sin against him, who 
violate his law, shall be punished even to the third 
and fourth generation? 

If it be true the God of nature never forgives 
till the penalty is paid, is it astonishing to find the 
same characteristic underlying the lineaments and 
operations of the God of the Old Testament? 

But where does Dr. Fosdick get his concept of 
a God of love? 

Does he get it from the ethical Christ whose 
ethical life he exalts? 

Well! It is this ethical Christ (so called) who 
has given us that text translated into every 
language and read in every land—that text of 
texts—John 3: 16. 

Read it over slowly and take it in. 

This is what it says: 

“God so loved the world, that he gave his only 
begotten Son.” 

Dr. Fosdick knows, as we all know, that the 
word “gave” here means “delivered up,” “sacrifi- 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 45 


cially delivered up,” “delivered up for the benefit 
of others.” 

He knows what we all know, that Paul uses the 
same word and tells out the full detail of its mean- 
ing in this unforgettable phrase: 

“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered 
him up for us all” (Rom. 8: 32). 

Wittingly or unwittingly, Dr. Fosdick gets his 
vision of God as a God of love from that most 
brutal and barbarous thing in all history—the 
cross of Christ. 

That cross of which Peter speaks and says: 


“Him, being delivered by the determinate coun- 
sel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and 
by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” 

A statement which involves these wicked hands 
as foreknown and as contained in the determining 
of the “determinate counsel,” a foreordination and 
determination which, if the modern mind be log- 
ical, it must classify as equally barbarous and 
cruel as any such act accredited to the God of the 
Old Testament. 

Not only was the act of these men foreknown, 
but foredetermined. 

The act of those “wicked”’ hands and the awful 


46 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


death those same hands were instrumental in pro- 
ducing weré foreordained, predetermined. 

That death of the cross which the Son of God 
declares he was under commandment from the — 
Father to endure. 

“Therefore doth my Father love me, because I 
lay down my life, that I might take it again. 

“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down 
of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I 
have power to take it again. This commandment 
have I received from my Father.” 

It is in view of this fact of ordination, determi- 
nation and commandment that the Apostle writes 
that Christ “‘became obedient unto death, even the 
death of the cross.” 

That cross which according to the unbroken: 
consensus of the New Testament is the expression 
of God’s merciless wrath against sin. 

That cross whereon Paul, claiming to speak by 
the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, says, God made 
him “to be sin for us.” 

But Dr. Fosdick’s scheme seeks to find its ful- 
filment this side of the cross, so far this side of the 
cross that it does not touch it at all, does not con- 
sider it as a factor worth while, even, to mention 
as such. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” AT 


It is the life Christ lived on the earth that 
arouses the enthusiasm of Dr. Fosdick. 

It is the living and ethical Christ appealing to 
the native ethics in man who brings about an 
achieved and ethical salvation. 

In this he is in irreconcilable conflict with Paul. 

Paul passes over the ethical, the earthly side of 
Christ’s life and finds his inspiration in the pur- 
pose for which Christ became incarnate. 

Paul declares the purpose of this incarnation to 
be sacrificial death. 

He says: 

He was made, “a little lower than the angels for 
the suffering of death”; and that he “by the grace 
of God should taste death for every man” (Heb. 
25.9). 

Dr. Fosdick’s program of preaching for himself 
and the students whom he would prepare for the 
ministry contradicts Paul’s program from begin- 
ning to end. 

Paul determined to know nothing but Christ 
and him crucified. 

Dr. Fosdick determines to know nothing but 
Christ and him—non-crucified. 


Dr. Fosdick preaches that Christ came into the 
world to live for men. 


48 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


Paul preaches that Christ came into the world 
to die for men. 


Dr. Fosdick preaches the unfolding of a divine 
life in men. 


Paul says the natural man is at enmity with > 
God, is not subject to the law of God and neither 
indeed can be. 

Dr. Fosdick says man is ever ascending to the 
heights where God dwells in Christ. 

Paul says he is ever descending, and left to him- 
self will depart from God forever. 

Dr. Fosdick insists that man has the nucleus of 
spiritual life in him. 

Paul says he is dead in trespasses and sins. 

There is no point or place of compromise be- 
tween Dr. Fosdick and the Apostle Paul. 

If you accept Dr. Fosdick you must reject Paul. 

If you accept Paul you must reject Dr. Fosdick. 

Dr. Fosdick preaches altogether another Gospel 
than that of Paul. 

Paul says if any man preach any other Gospel 
than that he preaches he is to be accursed. 

Here are his exact words: 

“But though we, or an angel from heaven, 
preach any other gospel unto you than that which 
we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE’’ 49 


“As we said before, so say I now again, If any 
man preach any other gospel unto you than that 
ye have received, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1: 
8,9). 

He declares his Gospel is not of man: 

“T certify you, brethren, that the gospel which 
was preached of me is not after man. 

“For I neither received it of man, neither was 
I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ’ 
(Gal. 1:11, 12). 

The Gospel that stirred the world and set 
Christianity in the earth was not the Gospel of 
Dr. Fosdick. 

No. 

The Gospel that moved the world was the story 
of “Jesus and the resurrection,” the high and ex- 
alted affirmation that, he ‘“‘was delivered for our 
offences, and was raised again for our justifica- 
tion.” 

Paul took the statement of Moses, ‘“‘with- 
out shedding of blood is no remission,” and joy- 
ously declared that in Christ we have “redemp- 
tion through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, 
according to the riches of his grace.” 

To those whose sins were as scarlet and red like 
crimson, the Apostle John (Our Lord’s most inti- 


50 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


mate disciple of the twelve) triumphantly an- 
nounced, ‘‘The blood of Jesus Christ his Son 
(God’s Son) cleanseth us from all sin.” 


The hope this Gospel held out to the Church was 
the Coming of Christ to the world again, coming 
so that every eye (over there in Palestine) should 
see him, and those especially who pierced him. 

And in saying this John was simply repeating 
what the pre-existent Christ himself had said 
through the mouth of the prophet Zechariah: 

“They shall look upon me whom they have 
pierced.” 

And this was but in anticipation of that hour 
when standing in the flesh before his judges he 
said: 

“Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting 
on the right hand of power, and coming in the 
clouds of heaven” (Matt. 26: 64). 

The Christ of Dr. Fosdick who has ceased, so 
to speak, from the “framework” of the flesh and 
survives only in his precepts and principles, or in 
the spirit of them, is not the Christ who on the 
night after he rose from the dead appeared to his 
disciples and announced that a spirit did not have 
flesh and bones as he said he had. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 51 


An Ethical and Not a Sacrificial Christ 


Nothing is more expressive of Dr. Fosdick’s 
relation to the Christ of God than the utterance 
he puts in the mouth of those whom he assumes 
are impatient with the preaching and the worship 
of a “theological Christ.” 

This is the utterance: 

“Have done with your theological Christ and 
give us back Jesus the ethical teacher” (p. 245). 

That, of course, is saying: 

“Away with the Christ whom the New Testa- 
ment (when not expurgated) declares to be a sin 
offering, a substitute and sin bearer, suffering the 
judgment due to others. 

“Talk to us no more about the cross of Christ, 
his sacrificial death. 

“Talk to us only of the man who lived and 
taught, and whose supreme claim to our suffrage 
lies in the life he lived here. 

“Give us his principles of living and neither the 
agony nor the doctrine of his death. 

“Give us the ethical Christ. 

“Never again speak to us of the sacrifice of 
Christ. 

“Never again offend our sensibilities with talk 
about the ‘blood of Christ.’ 


52 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


“Tf you talk about him, talk only of the mortal 
life he lived here.” 

And how will Dr. Fosdick reconcile this merely 
ethical Christ with the Christ set forth in the un- 
forgettable verses with which John opens his Gos- 
pel: 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word 
was with God, and the Word was God.” 

The ‘‘Word” in these verses is the Greek Logos, 
and this is what Dr. Fosdick, in his lecture on 
“Jesus the Messiah” (p. 214), has to say of the 
use of Logos by John: . 

“Logos was not a Jewish category at all. It 
was the most familiar, popular way of interpret- 
ing the divine approach to man which the Hel- 
lenistic world outside of Judaism knew. It was 
in current use in Stoicism, in Alexandrianism, in 
Platonism. If one were to be understood in phil- 
osophy in that day, one would as inevitably think 
in terms of that category as today one must think 
in terms of evolution. Hence, when Jesus was 
preached to Hellenists, the Logos idea was used.” 

While it is true John uses Logos to express the 
“Word,” since he was writing his Gospel in 
Greek, he was not thinking in any degree in the 
terms of Hellenistic philosophy, nor endeavoring 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 53 


to make any concession to that concept of God. 

John was a Jew, and when he thought of “the 
beginning,” he thought in the terms of the first 
chapter of Genesis. He thought in the Hebrew 
terms of God—Elohim; he thought particularly 
in the terms of the twenty-sixth verse of that first 
chapter: 

“And God said, Let us make man in our 
image.” 

In this you have a justification and a revela- 
tion. 

A justification of the plural term in the fact 
that the Hebrew word and title for God is a plural 
noun, and a revelation, in the fact that in God- 
head there is more than one person, revealed 
in the expression—‘‘Let us make man”; a 
further revelation that the person who speaks 
takes the initiative in creation and that he is the 
person who speaks for, who utters, the Godhead. 
He who speaks and utters the Godhead is no less 
than the Word of God. In the second and third 
chapters we learn that this person speaking, this 
Word of God, is the Lord God. We learn that it 
is the Lord God who in co-ordination with, and as 
the representative of, Godhead, formed man from 
the dust of the ground and breathed into his nos- 


54 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


trils the breath of life; and that it is he who cre- 
ated the heavens and the earth. In short, it is 
the Lord God by whom all things were created 
and made. 

When, therefore, John said, “In the beginning © 
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and 
the Word was God,” he was thinking of the Lord 
God. 

This Word (this Lord God), John tells us, “was 
made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld 
his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the 
Father), full of grace and truth.” 

The plain and simple fact which John sets be- 
fore us then is that Jesus Christ was no less than 
the Lord God incarnate. 

Logos as John uses it is not a compromise, made 
to meet the Hellenistic mind, but an opportunity 
in the use of the Greek word to pour through it 
the truth of God and the being of Christ antici- 
pated and revealed in Hebrew terms. 

In his endeavor to exalt an ethical Christ and 
at the same time give Him the atmosphere of 
divinity (not the divinity that creates heaven and 
earth, but a divinity that shall be a concession to, 
and proof of, the divinity common to us all), Dr. 
Fosdick says, “But if Jesus is divine and if divin- 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 55 


ity hedges us all about like the vital forces which 
in winter wait underneath the frozen ground 
until the spring comes, that is a gospel.” 

To this he adds: 

“Then the incarnation in Christ is the prophecy 
and hope of God’s indwelling in every one of us” 
(or2Thy: 

(That is, by nature.) 

This explains how Dr. Fosdick can so easily 
quote such passages as that Christ is “the first 
born among many brethren,” and ignoring, or 
slipping over all standards of exegetical righteous- 
ness, give that which belongs exclusively to those 
who have openly professed a saving faith in 
Christ, give it and other passages belonging to the 
same zone, to all men, believer and unbeliever 
alike. 

It is true, Paul tells us, Christ is declared to be 
the Son of God, but declared, demonstrated, prov- 
ed to be such by the resurrection from the dead, 
and by that selective resurrection becomes the 
first born among many brethren who, like him- 
self, shall be born (and in the same manner) from 
the womb of death and the grave. 

But Dr. Fosdick goes back (in his intent) to 
the original birth of Christ and seeks to make 


56 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BOOK 


that birth the herald of a common sonship of all 
men—a natural and universal brotherhood, call- 
ing for a common fatherhood of all men. 

It is the divinity in all men pre-eminently re- 
vealed in Christ that makes his humanity the 
guarantee for an eventual and universally redeem- 
ed humanity. 

A very startling Christ is he, indeed, whom Dr. 
Fosdick would present to us. 

Think of the initial fact of this Christ. 

That shining, wonderful star of his natal night 
a possible fiction and the nativity itself mostly 
fiction. 

Will you face the proposition with which Dr. 
Fosdick discounts his virgin birth, the proposition 
that it would be a useless biological miracle? 

-~ Have you thought straight up and down about 
the matter on the basis of the narrative record? 

If Christ were not virgin born, then, of course, 
in the full meaning of the term and the conse- 
quence if he were not so born, he was begotten of 
a human father, and that father demonstrably not 
Joseph, and therefore the mother of Christ once 
publicly and solemnly betrothed to him (and this 
betrothal counted as sacred and responsible as 
marriage) by the law of Jewish betrothal as 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 57 


guilty (in the eye of law and custom) as a wife 
who breaks wedlock; a Christ, because born out 
of actual wedlock, altogether illegitimate, and be- 
cause begotten of an unknown father, nothing 
better than a bastard; a Christ who since he had 
both a human father and a human mother could 
not have been the essential and only eternally be- 
gotten Son of the Father, and therefore no more 
supernatural than other humanly begotten and 
born sons of men. 

Not only that, but if he were begotten of a 
human father, as that father was sinful, then he 
had a sinful nature; having a sinful nature he 
was under the penalty of death; therefore he did 
not tell the truth when he said he could lay down 
his life and take it again at his will; not only that, 
but as he was under penalty of death for original 
sin, he needed a Saviour; not only that, he needed 
to be regenerated. 

This is the incontrovertible logic of denying the 
virgin birth. 

Having taken away from Christ the right to be 
considered the antitype and complete fulfilment of 
the Hebrew sacrifices; having denied necessarily 
any atoning value in his death, any redemptive or 
legally cleansing value in the shedding of his 


58 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


blood; having denied that he rose from the dead, 
“according to the scriptures,’ and will never re- 
turn to this world; having taken away every dis- 
tinctive lineament of him as the Scriptures pre- 
sent him, Dr. Fosdick tells us he is the final ex- 
pression of that divinity which is common to us 
all—and since common to all—the divinity that 
was in Judas who betrayed him and in the thief 
who reviled him. 

This consummative, ethical Christ is the Christ 
Dr. Fosdick brings before us, the Christ whom 
he tells us he loves, the Christ whom-he adores, 
whom he would have us likewise love and serve. 

This is Dr. Fosdick’s Christ, the Christ he finds 
in the Bible, but only in the Bible when it is mod- 
ernly used; only after its thought forms are recog- 
nized as shifting and temporary; only after the 
miraculous and supernatural side of Christ is 
deleted from its pages, so deleted that any one 
who has been accustomed to read of him and fol- 
low him according to the ancient use of the 
Scriptures may well cry out with Mary, “They 
have taken away my Lord, and I know not where 
they have laid him.” 

It is the exaltation of this Christ Dr. Fosdick 
has discovered that startles you, confounds you. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 59 


His enthusiasm for this Christ is overflowing, 
unbounded. 

He speaks of him as the abiding figure on the 
horizon of time. All other figures pale before him 
as the stars before the sun. He talks of his repro- 
ductive power in the lives of men, his living force 
in human hearts. He talks at times in ways that 
could not be called less than ‘‘orthodox,” with all 
the accent that may be put upon the word. He 
speaks of a “living” Lord, till the unwary listening 
to the great exaltation would say, “Dr. Fosdick is 
one of the most loyal and loving preachers of 
Christ in the world, he exalts him, glorifies him, 
wins your sympathy with his sympathy and makes 
you enthusiastic with his enthusiasm”; but the 
hard, cold fact is this: the Christ whom Dr. Fos- 
dick so richly and in jeweled phrases preaches is 
not the Christ of the New Testament at all. It 
is a Christ evolved out of his inner consciousness 
and intensive imagination. It is a Christ he has 
created and built up for himself, a Christ who 
does not, and never can, exist save in the imagina- 
tion of the man or men who rob Him of every 
right and title that is his, rights and titles that 
can be taken from him only by tearing to pieces 
and destroying the Scriptures that record them. 


60 A REVIEW OF Dr. FOSDICK’s Book 


Behold how Dr. Fosdick has robbed him of all 
the New Testament gives him: he has robbed him 
of the golden crown of deity and replaced it with 
the tin foil crown of a divinity common to man. 
He has robbed him of the right to take his body 
out of the grave, and having barred the earth 
against him at every point of the compass, says he 
shall never come back to this world, that we shall 
never see him again on this earth. 


This is the Christ “The Modern Use of the 
Bible” would exhort the ministry to preach in 
our churches, teach in our Sunday-schools and 
proclaim in foreign lands. 


This is the Christ whom, after he has been 
purged from all that is supernatural, Dr. Fosdick 
has the courage to call ‘‘divine.” 


This So Called Divinity of Christ 
is a Divinity Minus Omnipotence 


But lest some echo of Nice or Chalcedon should 
be misinterpreted and the abundant and all- 
embracing phrase that neither time can alter nor 
custom stale, even that phrase, “God of God, and 
very God of very God’; lest that mighty colloca- 
tion, that piled-up wealth of definition, should lead 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE’ 61 


some unsuspecting soul to transmute “divinity” 
into “deity,” and thereby spoil the whole scheme 
of which “The Modern Use of the Bible” is the 
full expression, Dr. Fosdick pulls down any tempt- 
ing structure built upon the device of councils and 
the plastic, metaphysical imagination of men, and 
definitely defining this ubiquitous word, ‘“‘divin- 
ity,” gives us the fixed, even, “static” lineaments 
of the divine Christ he would have us believe in 
and over whom in uplifted phrase his enthusiasm 
flames out. 

This is the way in which he defines and deter- 
mines the divinity of Christ: 

“In everything that matters to our spiritual 
life, very God came to us in Christ.” 

That sounds large, full, complete, and has 
apparently a horizonless sweep; but then he adds, 
and the explicatory addition comes like the crash 
of unexpected thunder on the stillness of a cloud- 
less sky—these shattering words: 

“To be sure, nobody should ever go to Jesus, to 
his manger and his Cross, to find the omnipotence 
which swings Orion and the Pleiades. Omnipotence 
in that sense is not revealed there” (p. 269). 

Although Dr. Fosdick tells us not to quibble 
about a supposed difference between divinity and 


62 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BOOK 


deity that is not really there; although he assures 
us this distinction rests upon an endeavor to think 
of God in terms of metaphysical substance and 
Pure Being conceived apart from spiritual quality, . 
and that the insistent endeavor to define the rela- 
tion of Christ with him in the same terms is an 
endeavor useless for religion and “properly out- 
lawed from good philosophy,” in spite of the theo- 
logical and academical turn to the clause, the fact 
remains that the divinity with whatever of “very 
God” may somehow be in it in the “spiritual” 
quality with which it environs it and shields itself 
is— 

Divinity minus Omnipotence. 

However it may be good or bad philosophy, the 
fact as Dr. Fosdick states it cannot be ignored. 

This is the fact: 

The divinity of Christ is divinity minus omnip- 
otence. 

And Dr. Fosdick is able to say this in face of 
the unrebuked exclamation and full confession of 
Thomas that no amount of ingenuity can modify: 

“My Lord and my God.” 

He says it in face of Paul’s direct statement 
that Jesus Christ created all things. 


Paul leaves us in no doubt about that creative 
action. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 63 


He says: 

“By him were all things created, that are in 
heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, 
whether they be thrones, or dominions, or princi- 
palities, or powers: all things were created by 
him, and for him: and he is before all things 
(therefore, uncreated) and by him all things con- 
sist” (are “held together,” and this is saying noth- 
ing less than that the universe is Christo-centric). 

Dr. Fosdick denies omnipotence to Christ in 
face of that other immense affirmation of Paul: 

He “upholdeth all things (and therefore Orion 
and the Pleiades) by the word of his power.” 

He denies omnipotence and therefore deity to 
Christ in face of the doubly reported declaration 
of God the Father, owning the pre-existent Christ 
as his Son: 

“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.” 

Dr. Fosdick makes his statement about omnip- 
otence in face of our Lord’s own claim as he 
stood in the reported “flesh and bones” of his 
resurrection body: 

“All power (and what is that but omnipotence?) 
is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” 

I have no particular wish to turn this article I 
am writing into controversial argumentation; to 


64 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


leave Dr. Fosdick’s bare statement alone, to let 
it stand out by itself in its absolute nakedness, 
ought to be sufficient to classify his definition of 
divinity in so far as it relates to God’s Christ and 
God’s Son. But I am under bonds to this oppor- 
tunity as a witness for the New Testament Christ, 
now that the challenge is thrown down, to con- 
sider for a space the claims which He made for 
himself when on the earth; nor can these claims 
get intermittance of essential right whether we 
balance the difference between pre-existence and 
incarnation or any lapsing space between the two 
given points, the manger and the cross; for, if 
Christ were ever God at all, God the Son as 
well as Son of God, he was as much God with the 
attribute of omnipotence, as much God in sub- 
stance, being and personality, when he was 
wrapped in swaddling bands in that body he had 
accepted as the “prepared body” from the Father ; 
as much God, very God, when, indeed, as God he 
offered on the cross the humanity he had created 
for himself and for that purpose; as much very 
God there between those two points, the manger 
and the cross, as in any time or eternity of his 
personal acting; for, accepting the record that he 
was pre-existently in the ‘form of God,” at no 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 65 


point in eternity did he “empty himself” of more 
than his form and appearing as God. 

Let us hear some of the claims he made for 
himself in the days, we will say, of ‘“‘his flesh.” 

He said whatever the Father did, he himself, 
as the Son of the Father, could do “likewise’’; 
that is, “same-wise,”’ in the same manner, under 
the same impulse, or power. 

Let us get his full utterance: 

“What things soever he (the Father) doeth, 
these also doeth the Son likewise” (John 5:19). 

Since the ‘‘wise” in which the Father did things 
was as Omnipotent God, the “likewise” which 
Christ claimed as the Son was the claim that he 
could do things even with the omnipotence of the 
Father. 

To astounded Jews he once said: 

“Before Abraham was I am.” 

They took up stones to stone him. 

And why? 

Not because he claimed pre-existence,—they 
had no objection to that,—but because in giving 
his answer he said: 

“T am.” 

He did not say, “Before Abraham was, I was.” 

No, he said: “I am.” 


66 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


In saying that, saying it under the circum- 
stances and in the form he did, banishing both 
past and future as any part of his personal exist- 
ence, and radiating the idea that he in himself 
possessed a being that was ever abiding and there- 
fore a changeless present, he actually claimed to 
be he who at the burning bush defined himself 
28, Liam thet ani’ 

It was because he linked the sacred and incom- 
municable name of the sovereign God to his own 
selfhood that they sought to stone him, to kill him, 
to put an end to him as a wicked blasphemer, not 
fit to live. 

To equally astonished listeners in the temple 
he uttered this, if you please, metaphysical state- 
ment, this unmitigated and challenging proposi- 
tion: 

“IT and my Father are one” (John 10:30). 

To be sure it is little more than kindergarten 
analysis to recognize the numerical adjective as 
in the neuter and therefore to be assured when he 
said, “I and my Father are one,” he actually said, 
“T and my Father are one thing.” 

That certainly was stating a “relation.” 

As a thing is a substance, then he and the 
Father would be one in some substance. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 67 


In the under meaning of the term therefore the 
phrase may read: 

“T and my Father are one substance.” 

We are under no necessity to speculate about it, 
we know the substance of the Father is, 

“Pure Being.” 

Thus Christ actually said: 

“T and my Father are one Pure Being. 

The Being of the Father we are agreed is deity. 

In the meaning of the term our Lord actually 
said: 

“T and my Father are one deity.” 

Because of the poverty of the richest language, 
we are forced to translate the word and idea of 
“deity,” by that other word—‘“God.” 

The climax of it then is this, in saying “I and 
my Father are one,” our Lord Jesus Christ said: 

“IT and my Father are one God.” 

It is not necessary to affirm that either Nice or 
Chalcedon were in his mind, but I know no reason 
why they might not have been there; indeed, it 
would be difficult to see how they were not, own- 
ing him as God, as very God. I see no reason 
why he did not know them as the coming form- 
ative centers of a final and justified theology in 
respect to his personality and being. 


68 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


It is not necessary I should expand this utter- 
ance of Jesus Christ in all its content, which the 
logic of intensive study and analysis afterward 
forced men to conclude as in the essence of his — 
being and its relation. It is all there in these 
simple but majestic words: 

“T and my Father are one.” 

By this utterance he did say: 

“My Father is one person to whom I say, 
‘Thou’; I am another and distinct person to whom 
my Father says, ‘Thou.’ Although my Father 
and I are distinct persons, so that he is the Father 
and not the Son, and I am the Son and not the 
Father, yet the Father and I are one undivided 
and Pure Being—one God.” 

The modern mind may be unable to receive this 
definition and upon this basis, the basis of that 
simple expression, “I and my Father are one.” 

The excited crowd of Jews ready to mob him, 
to stone him to death, had no difficulty in reaching 
a conclusion as to the meaning and intent of the 
words. 

Because they had no difficulty about it they took 
up the stones to stone him. 

When he asked why they would stone him, this 
is the answer they gave him: 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 69 


“Because that thou, being a man, makest thy- 
self God” (John 10:33). 


They knew he meant both in essence and atti- 
tude he was very God the Son, as much as the 
Father was very God the Father. 

No greater claim of omnipotence than the claim 
made in the words of Jesus Christ could be made. 

And it is to be repeated, there is no point either 
at the manger or at the cross where he could be 
less than what his claim would make him to be— 
essentially God. 

He could restrain his omnipotence. 

He could do that because he was omnipotent. 

Only God could so restrain his omnipotence. 

But—he could not cease to be essentially God 
at any point in his existence; as it is written: 

“He cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:18). 

There is yet another claim: 

The claim made in his final prayer in John 17, 
and in the most amazing part of that amazing 
prayer: 

“And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine 
own self with the glory which I had with thee 
(literally, ‘by thy side’) before the world was.” 

There are the recorded claims of Jesus Christ— 


70 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’s Book 


claims from which essential relationship cannot 
be “outlawed.” 

How shall we deal with them? 

They are there. 

Something must be done with them. 


Shall we do as has been suggested when such 
literalism confronts us—go back and listen to 
Christ ‘‘over the head of his reporters’? 


Shall we charge these reporters with taking the 
simple, spiritually intended words of Christ as 
originally uttered, changing their form, “height- 
ening for effect,” ‘“‘adding,” actually putting into 
his mouth words he never uttered, and of which 
he never dreamed? 

Let us get back, however, to Orion and the 
Pleiades. 

If Christ were not virgin born, if he were 
humanly begotten; if he had only the humanity a 
human father gave him, then Dr. Fosdick is 
entirely in the right when he denies him any claim 
to omnipotence, whether in the manger, on the 
cross, or at any time between his birth and his 
death. 

No mere man, nay, no exceptional man, in 
whom there may be a deposit of the divinity com- 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” val 


mon (as it is said) to all men, could by any means 
swing Orion and the Pleiades. 

Here then by the ministration of Dr. Fosdick 
we have arrived. 

We are at the termini. 

They are there for us to contemplate: 

A Christ without omnipotence. 

A Christ subject to the interpretation of mod- 
ern mind. 

A Christ whose history has been largely in- 
vented, whose supreme claims are fiction, whose 
miracles were never performed. 

A Bible contradicted by science, unreliable in 
history, not always moral, and whose shifting 
thought forms, whose uncertain “framework,” 
make it of avail only as it can be proven by per- 
sonal experience. 

Nothing more destructive to the ancient or 
former use of the Bible, nothing more nullifying 
to its former value in the general mind, nothing 
more challenging to the fact of Christ it has been 
accustomed to proclaim, has ever been written 
than this book, “The Modern Use of the Bible’; 
not the coarse sentences of a Paine, the preten- 
tious logic of a Hume, the slavering foulness of a 
Voltaire, nor the cheap misrepresentations and 


(2 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BOOK 


conundrum-like utterances and denunciations of 
an oratorical Ingersoll, have ever more deliber- 
ately, though subtly and often most attractively, 
sought to ruin confidence in the Bible our fathers | 
loved and whose faith and piety are our heritage. 


The Modern Use of the Bible Necessary to Keep 
the Educated Generation in the Church 


In view of all this, therefore, it is legitimate 
that I should ask on what ground does Dr. Fos- 
dick as a professed Christian, a minister of the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ, and a teacher-of students 
for the ministry,—on what ground does he justify 
himself in repudiating the ancient, and demand- 
ing the modern, use of the Bible? 

He tells us much, and enthusiastically, about 
new evidence (not for, but against the ancient 
use of the Bible)—knowledge unfamiliar to men 
of former times, new instrumentalities with which 
more accurately to determine the value of a text. 

But surely he knows that none of this has 
affected, nor can in any way affect, the funda- 
mental statements of the Book as to man’s con- 
stitution, sin, death, the person of Christ, the fact 
of his cross, the record of his resurrection, ascen- 
sion, and the multiplied statements as to his Sec- 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” v5) 


ond Coming. There is no new text that can, even 
in a degree, change the angle, the setting, nor the 
intrinsic value of these granite statements. 

All the increased knowledge apart from the text 
of the Bible does not render untenable the great, 
recorded decree of the Son of God: 

“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the 
kingdom of God.” 

Dr. Fosdick himself involuntarily testifies that 
the Babylonian literature out of which at one 
time it was so categorically stated Moses had 
drawn the cosmological record of Genesis, has 
been proven to be a lot of pitiful rubbish and alto- 
gether negligible stuff. 

The larger and more critical attainment in 
Greek scholarship has not changed that immense, 
far ringing, confessional phrase: 


6 xbptos pov xat 6 Oedg pov, 


It seems out of place to talk about scholarship 
as the special endowment or equipment of an oli- 
garchy of candor, a hierarchy of particular sin- 
cerity, within whose restrained and special circle 
the truth will be told and not even the suspicion 
of obscurantism tolerated; very startling to talk 
in such fashion in the face of men who bring 


74 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’s Book 


accredited scholarship and untainted sincerity in 
their support of the old text and who kneel at the 
feet of a Christ concerning whom they say as 
reverently and as fully as did Thomas of old: 

“My Lord and my God.” 

Men who find all the newly discovered readings 
have not changed a single accent in the sweet 
clarity of that Gospel which testifies God the 
Father made his Son who knew no sin to be sin 
for us, so many of us, who seem to know nothing 
so much as sin, that we might be made the very 
righteousness of God in him. 

But Dr. Fosdick persists in environing himself 
in the atmosphere of “advanced,” and “agreed,” 
scholarship and by it finds his justification for 
demanding a modern use of the Bible. 

He justifies himself on the ground that as now 
written and edited, the Bible actually contradicts, 
and is contradicted, by science, by history and 
human experience. 

Every year, we are told, an army of young men 
and young women are pouring out through the 
gateway of school, academy, college and univer- 
sity and, unless something is done to avert the 
catastrophe, this rising generation, filled with the 
new knowledge which science brings, unable to 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 15 


accept the Bible as it has been interpreted, will 
repudiate it, turn their back upon the Church 
and refuse to listen, even, to its attempted ethics. 

To save this generation, these future molders 
of the world, the Bible must be interpreted in the 
light of science, on the plane of an enlarged con- 
cept of humanity and the possible consciousness 
of God in the soul. 

Better a thousand times (that is the logic of 
this conclusion)—better a thousand times cut to 
pieces the Old Testament with its blood-thirsty 
and exterminating God; better join hands with 
the scientist in repudiating the unscientific and 
merciless God it portrays and banish him for- 
ever from the consideration of men; better cut 
out of the New Testament every recorded miracle 
accredited to Christ, every claim reported to be 
made by himself; better turn the Gospels into an 
accepted patch work of fiction and the epistles, 
particularly those of Paul, inspired by his reaction 
from the Torah and the complications of the Tal- 
mud, into nothing of more value than the expres- 
sion of personal opinion; better to take the crown 
of deity from Christ and reshape it into a divin- 
ity of “spiritual quality” only; better seal up the 
tomb and keep within it the dust of his unrisen 


76 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


body; better repeat over and over again that his 
resurrection is nothing more than the persistence 
of his precepts and principles; better all that at 
any cost to the worth of the New Testament and 
the Bible as a whole, than by an out of date and 
lamentable perversity hold on to it in the old, 
absurd and exploded idea that it is the “inspired, 
inerrant, infallible Word of God,” and thus drive 
this scientific new generation into the undertow of 
an ever deepening tide of materialism. 

In short, to save this generation from a moral 
and spiritual debacle; in order to save them for 
God and their fellow men, it is better to cast away 
this Book than persistently present it as the per- 
fect and final revelation from God to man. 

Here, indeed, is the secret of Dr. Fosdick’s atti- 
tude to the Bible. He would take out of it all 
that is miraculous, supernatural, and superhuman, 
in order that he may make it acceptable to the 
natural man; a Bible that may be received by the 
natural heart of unbelief as readily as a news- 
paper or a magazine article; and this too, in face 
of the declaration of Holy Scripture that “the 
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit 
of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither 
can he know them.” 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 17 


Dr. Fosdick Elusive and Contradictory 


In spite of his quality as a writer Dr. Fosdick 
is elusive and to a degree contradictory as a 
thinker, and is always, by virtue of this endow- 
ment, escaping from the point where you would 
hold him to the logic of his basic propositions. 

At one moment his writing is as fully infidelic 
in form as that of any openly confessed infidel, 
just as caustic, just as relentlessly destructive, 
turning ancient faith into folly and modern con- 
fidence into absurdity ; and then, suddenly, he will 
turn and appeal for a more intensive faith in 
the Book which he has endeavored to break and 
mutilate; or, exalting it to a plane where he dem- 
onstrates the poverty and intellectual ruin that 
would fall on the world were the world robbed of 
it, he will immediately snatch it from you as a 
fetish and rebuke your devotion to it as a bibli- 
olatry of which you should be ashamed. At one 
moment giving you a stab of criticism, in which 
the criticism is so double-edged with scientific 
assertion and the cold steel of cynicism that every 
nerve of faith and hope in respect to the Book is 
paralyzed, he will turn again and as with a royal 
largess pour into your heart the all-pervading 


78 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


balm of assurance for every doubt, bidding you 
believe what you have lost you have in reality 
gained. 

As an example of this elusiveness and the 
undercurrent of contradiction, note what he has 
to say about miracles. 

“We do not accept Biblical narratives of the 
miraculous as an act of faith. We do it, if we 
do it at all, because we are historically convinced. 
Approaching the Bible so, there are some nar- 
ratives of miracles there which I do not believe. 
To suppose that a man in order to be a loyal and 
devout disciple of our Lord in the twentieth 
century A. D. must think that God in the ninth 
century B. C. miraculously sent bears to eat up 
unruly children or made an axe-head swim seems 
to me dangerously ridiculous * * * Joshua making 
the sun stand still may be poetry and the story of 
Jonah and the great fish may be parable; the 
miraculous aspects of the plagues in Egypt and 
the magic fall of Jericho’s walls may be legend- 
ary heightenings of historical events; the amaz- 
ing tales of Elijah and Elisha may be largely folk- 
lore; and, in the New Testament, finding a coin 
in a fish’s mouth to pay the temple tax, or walk- 
ing on water, or blasting a tree with a curse, may 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 19 


be just such stories as always have been associated 
with an era of outstanding personalities and 
creative spiritual power. Certainly, I find some 
of the miracle-narratives of Scripture historically 
incredible” (pp. 163, 164). 

Having classified these miracles as poetry, or 
parable, legendary folk-lore, ‘‘heightenings,” that 
is, invention, pure fiction, narratives to him 
utterly incredible, Dr. Fosdick comes back on the 
basis of psychic research in respect to the “puz- 
zling”’ record of the resurrection of Christ, as 
indicated by a psychic investigator whom he 
quotes, and with an evident desire to tone down 
the shock his repudiation of the miracles cited 
might give, says: 

“There is no use in pretending that we know 
more than we do, and about many an ancient 
miracle-narrative a man may well suspend judg- 
ment awaiting light” (p. 165). 

Another illustration of this elusive method and 
the seeming involuntary and contradictory swing 
back in a rush of rhetorical exaltation of the Book 
his rationalistic statements have so maltreated 
(just as though one who had smitten you in the 
face turned and graciously offered an emollient 
whose application should take away some of the 


80 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’s Book 


inflammation produced by the blow), after hav- 
ing frankly stated the origin of the Bible is imma- 
ture and childlike, he glorifies the opening lines of 
that Bible in this softening and gracious fashion: | 

“When one turns from this welter of mythology 
(Babylonian) to the first chapter of Genesis, with 
its stately and glorious exordium, ‘In the begin- 
ning God created the heavens and the earth,’ one 
feels as though he had left miasmic marshes for 
a high mountain with clean air to breathe and 
great horizons to look upon” (p. 52). 

After calling the Bible a “framework” and its 
construction mere shifting thought forms whose 
language is a speech two thousand years out of 
date, whose “every idea started from primitive 
and childlike origins,” many of whose statements 
are only fiction, and whose miracle narratives are 
“incredible,” is there anything finer than this 
from any man’s pen or tongue? 

Just this: 

“As for our English classics, take from them the 
contribution of the Scriptures and the remain- 
der would resemble a town in Flanders after the 
big guns were through with it” (p. 3). 

It is this elusiveness, this softening the blow 
before or after it is given, this sudden appeal to 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 81 


the residuary and reminiscent belief, even, in the 
most naturally unbelieving that disarms suspicion 
and leads people, some people, really to believe 
that Dr. Fosdick is the prophet who is seeking 
to clear away all obstacles to faith and is in truth 
devoting himself to the defense of the Bible. 

His elusiveness becomes vagueness—when dip- 
lomatically necessary. 

Take the full lecture on miracles. 

Did any man ever before use such terms, such 
definitions of miracles, such denial of any that 
cannot be verified historically, and yet such assur- 
ance that miracles are within the law and should 
be fully expected today? And then when we are 
on the eve of recognizing God has (because 
of his own limitless being, because his own being 
is a miracle) all embracing laws out of sight that 
may include any operation which seems against 
what we have known as law heretofore, we 
find suddenly the miracles to which reference is 
made are in reality nothing more than providen- 
tial guidance of men, God’s moral action in men, so 
that, by the time we are at the end of the treatise, 
we are in an impasse and are forced to conclude 
this uninterrupted run of smooth, flowing speech 
about miracles is after all only another skillful 


82 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BOOK 


use of language to hide the undercurrent of real 
thought. Surely, I should not wish to be less 
than courteous, but I am satisfied were a premium 
offered to the person who could find out what Dr. 
Fosdick actually means by miracles, no man would 
ever come forward to claim the prize. 

And yet when you allow this outwardly vague 
utterance to permeate and dissolve in your mind 
you are persuaded that when Dr. Fosdick says 
some miracles to him are incredible as reported, 
he means all recorded as such in the Bible 
are, finally and flatly, incredible and impossible, 
to him. 

After every thrust at the literal reading of the 
Book he comes back to spiritual experience and 
skillfully substitutes experience for the text itself. 

It is this constantly attempted exaltation of 
the spiritual side of the Bible, the spiritual that 
is said to run through it, experiences that are veri- 
fied more or less in every age and in every individ- 
ual history, which blinds the average person who 
reads a book like “The Modern Use of the Bible,” 
or hears its exalted sentiments in spoken ad- 
dresses, and takes away for the time being all 
the effect of the smashing blows given to the 
verbal integrity of the Bible. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 83 


Applauded by Infidels 


That in the twentieth century Dr. Fosdick 
should teach this Bible whose thought forms he 
believes to have been outgrown and now hope- 
lessly out of date; that he should teach this 
Bible to be the ceaseless power for producing 
spiritual experience, and in proportion as we 
get rid of its thought forms, rebuke the literal 
interpretation of it, the foolish attempt to find 
typical characteristics and make them the 
key and demonstration of supposedly funda- 
mental truths; the more we accuse it and prove 
it guilty of falsehood in verbal terms; the 
more we smite and reject its claims as directly 
inspired of God, in that proportion, we exalt the 
Bible, recommend it, and help make it the abid- 
ing source of spiritual experience; that Dr. Fos- 
dick is willing to do this shows a high state of 
courage and an intense enthusiasm which, when 
all verbalism is laid aside, is just pure, cold, meas- 
ureless unbelief, the unbelief that is of the same 
quality to be found in every unregenerate mind 
and accentuated in every unqualified infidel. 

And it is a startling revelation of the inner 
quality of Dr. Fosdick’s book, its appeal to the 


84. A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’s Book 


natural unbelief in man and the quick apprehen- 
sion the natural mind has of its quality, that some 
of the warmest commendations come from those 
who have no place for any kind of a Christ, and 
to whom the Bible has always been and ever will 
be nothing more than a human product of unequal 
values, and under no condition and in no sense 
whatever a revelation from God. 

Even those who hate Christ and would destroy 
the Bible applaud Dr. Fosdick’s book; they ap- 
plaud it because they see in it the entering wedge 
to destroy faith in the Christ who has been wor- 
shiped and adored as God, even when loved and 
trusted as perfect man. 

They see in it the force that would help dis- 
lodge the Bible from its place of authority in the 
mind and soul of man, and open more widely the 
door of that naturalism which gives no welcome 
to a transcendental, interfering and finally judg- 
ing God. 


Dr. Fosdick a Dangerous Teacher 


I consider Dr. Fosdick the most dangerous 
teacher in the professing Church, and just be- 
cause of some of these qualities I have outlined, 
his elusiveness, his now and then swinging back 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 85 


with exalted utterance as though he had found a 
way by which he could reveal faith in the Bible 
and in God’s Christ as never before, his apparent 
defense of the Bible (what he allows to remain of 
it), and his glorification of Christ (after he has 
actually robbed him of the glory the Bible would 
give him), all this insistent demand for the high- 
est type of Christian faith and devotion to Christ, 
give him an open door and a quick entrance to 
minds not on guard, and specially to that type 
of mind which makes charity cover any multitude 
of sins, who would think no evil and would accept 
honest motive even though it “might pave the way 
to hell,” and who recognize sincerity as sufficient 
grace for any attitude. ! 

All that the worst enemy has ever said against 
the Christ of the New Testament as the New Tes- 
tament stands, in the denial of his miracles, his 
claims, his omnipotence, his redeeming blood, his 
bodily resurrection, and the blessed, sunlit hope 
of his Coming again; all that the most conscience- 
less critic has ever said against the verbal integ- 
rity of the Bible, he has said; all that could be 
given as a demonstration that it is not the fully 
inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God,—the 


86 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


final, fixed authority for the soul of man,—he has 
given. 

But he does all this while calling the Christ 
whom he preaches—Master (and no one uses that . 
word ‘“‘Master” with greater unction), testifying 
of his devotion, his adoration and boundless desire 
to glorify him (although it is impossible to visual- 
ize him if he did not rise in the flesh, the only 
vision he can really have of him being the yester- 
day of his life on earth). 

It is this attitude so many see, rather than the 
emphasis of his destructive criticism which they 
hear. 

It is this subtle use of orthodox phrases, while 
in his heart of hearts he does not believe in the 
facts those phrases express, which renders Dr. 
Fosdick so actually dangerous. 

Nothing can more dramatically and dynam- 
ically show the utter destructiveness of Dr. Fos- 
dick’s teaching in its ultimate overthrow of the 
Christ of the New Testament, than the scene at 
Bethany. 

I do not mean merely the resurrection of Laza- 
rus, but the words of our Lord to Martha. 

He said to her: 

“T am the resurrection, and the life: he that 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 87 


believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he 
live: 

“And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall 
never die.” 

Now, all the ingenuity in the world cannot get 
away from the fact that when he said, ‘‘though 
he were dead, yet shall he live,” he meant a per- 
son in general who should be just as dead as 
Lazarus then was as to his body in his four-day- 
old grave; and that this dead person (dead as 
Lazarus was according to the record) should be 
made alive in his body, that his body should be 
made alive. 

There cannot be, there ought not to be, any 
doubt that absolute logic requires us to under- 
stand the words of our Lord. as follows: 

“He that believeth in me, though he were dead 
(dead in his body), yet shall he live (be made alive 
in his body, when I come): 

“And whosoever liveth (is alive in his body) 
and believeth in me shall never die (in his body. 
when I come).” 

That this exegesis is absolutely sound and is 
wholly and entirely impregnable is seen, demon- 
strated, and proved, in the triumphant announce- 
ment of Paul: 


88 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


“We shall not all sleep (die in our body), but 
we (believers who are alive in the body) shall all 
be changed (not die), 

“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at 
the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and 
the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we 
(those who are alive) shall be changed.” 

All this exclusively, of course, in relation to 
those who are in Christ, and who are Christ’s and 
whose resurrection and transfiguration will take 
place as Paul tells us, ‘‘at his coming.” 

Here then you have just what Christ said to 
Martha, not only as a promise whose local fulfil- 
ment should be then and there at Bethany, but 
as a general proposition that when he should come 
to the world again the dead who had fallen asleep 
in his name should be raised from the dead as to 
the body and the living who believed in him should 
never die. 

But, if Christ did not rise in his body, in 
his flesh (as Dr. Fosdick says he did not); if he 
cannot and will not come again (as Dr. Fosdick 
says he will not), then the dead who died in the 
faith of him will not rise from the grave (as Dr. 
Fosdick says they will not); nor ever will the 
time come when Christians shall cease from dying, 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 89 


but like dumb driven cattle that go stumbling to 
the slaughter, they shall go one after the other, 
young man and maiden, father, mother, all the 
tender, linked up relations of life, to the blackest 
scandal on the face of the earth, the grave of cor- 
ruption and tongueless silence. 

Then the promise made to Martha, and through 
Martha to the Church,—the promise which was 
to be literally fulfilled.—as it was fulfilled at 
Bethany by his Coming, will never be fulfilled. 

The Christian minister who believes Dr. Fos- 
dick’s teaching dare not quote this Bethany utter- 
ance of our Lord. He will be smitten in his own 
self respect if he do so; for, unless these words 
are associated with our Lord’s second, personal 
and physical Coming, they have no meaning even 
in the most intense endeavor to rarify them by 
spiritualizing them. 

When he shall be called to speak a word over 
the dead, the Christian dead, what shall he do? 

When he stands out there by the grave and 
faces the tears of the heartbroken (for always we 
weep as though death were some new and unex- 
pected thing), when these tears moisten the clods 
of the coffin lid (as no rain from heaven can ever 
moisten them), will this minister say to those be- 


90 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


reaved who wait with repressed emotion to hear 
him—will he say: 

“My friends, Jesus Christ will never again 
come to this world. It is true he promised he | 
would, but he will not. He did not rise from the 
dead, his own body long ago yielded to corruption 
and turned to dust. The body of your dead will 
never rise from the clutch of death, from the claim 
of the grave, science, philosophy and historic evi- 
dence are all against it; but, for myself, I believe 
in the ‘persistence of personality through death’ 
(p. 98). I would comfort you therefore with this 
individual opinion of mine.” 

How like a shameful farce it would be. 

What a throwing down of God’s Christ and his 
promise of intended comfort into the mire of the 
rankest unbelief that ever could exude from a 
human heart. 

And yet this is what the honesty of every man 
who believes what Dr. Fosdick teaches about the 
resurrection and the Coming of Christ puts him 
under bonds to say. 


The Effect of Modernism 


What shall be said of the general effect when 
such lectures as “The Modern Use of the Bible” 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 91 


are delivered, such a book circulated, such a min- 
istry as expressed by it welcomed, paraded, ex- 
alted and even rapturously applauded by leaders 
in the Church and exploited by an ever widening 
zone of professed Christian preachers? 

When the man outside, to say nothing of the 
man in the church and in the pew, hears the mod- 
ern preacher (the preacher who believes in the 
modern use of the Bible) deny the Bible doctrine 
of fiat creation and argue for uniformitarianism, 
the unbegun, never ending cycles of sameness, 
birth, death, destruction, recreation and repeated 
cycles of birth, death, destruction; when he hears 
the preacher repudiate with much suggested irony 
the idea of a transcendental God, free and inde- 
pendent of his own creation, at liberty and suffi- 
ciently “high powered” to work out his own will, 
and along the plotted curve of a predestined pur- 
pose down to the detail that takes account of the 
fall of a sparrow and the exact number of the 
hairs of the head; and then hears him, after this 
attempted cynicism, talk in flowing phrases of the 
“immanent” God, at home and at ease in a world 
where all is well, and knows by the most elemental 
working of his own mind that this “immanent” 
God while furnishing a fine adjectival title to con- 


92 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BookK 


jure with before high school graduates and minis- 
terial novitiates, in final terms is nothing more 
than an impersonal force bound up with, and an in- 
tegral part of, the machine, self evolved, and from | 
which there is no escape; when this listener hears 
preachers deny the Bible doctrine of the origin of 
man, such as that God formed him by direct action 
of His will and power, and hears the preacher 
demonstrate that countless ages ago man came up 
out of a hint or touch of chlorophyl somewhere in 
some far, uncharted sea and then from its unmap- 
ped shores with a clinging grain of sand or dust 
came through lowest and most repulsive lines of 
bestial forms to his present state; when he hears 
the preacher deny that sin is treason against the 
Most High God, that it is nothing more than con- 
genital weakness, physical malformation, lack of 
social adjustment; when he hears the preacher 
refuse to accept death as the penalty and proof of 
sin and witness of the begun judgment of that 
God who is carrying all things onward to a final 
assize; when he hears him deny there is a hell and 
is silent about any promised heaven; when he 
hears the modernist preacher say the Bible is 
mainly made up of poetry, legendary folk-lore and 
miracle narratives that are scientifically and his- 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 93 


torically “incredible”; that it is some two thou- 
sand years verbally out of date and is in absolute 
conflict with final truth, what can be the conclu- 
sion of such a listener, whether saint or sinner, 
but that the Bible is a book over which no busy, 
responsible man should spend time either to as- 
sail or defend; that at best it is nothing more than 
a treatise on morals in this life, morals which 
seem little better practised by those who attempt 
to defend it than by those who have no interest 
whatever in it. 

What conclusion can a listener to the modern 
preacher reach about himself, but that Job’s ques- 
tion, “If a man die, shall he live again?” has never 
been answered and that he is absolutely left in 
the dark about God and his own soul and any “to- 
morrow” of any sort; and as life is so brief, its 
tenure so uncertain, and money the only power 
that counts, his imperative obligation in this 
swiftly flying present is to lay hold of money, 
“get rich quick,” honestly always, if he can, but, 
as there is no supreme tribunal before which he 
must answer in any hereafter, then get rich, seek- 
ing only to be quick witted enough to avoid com- 


ing into contact with tribunals and judgments 
here below. 


94 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


Do you wonder when the advanced preacher 
repudiates the Bible doctrine of the way of salva- 
tion through a penally sacrificial, and blood re- 
deeming Christ, denies a future of eternal woe 
and personal suffering to those who are “out of 
Christ,”’ and to all who definitely repudiate him 
as the Book presents him; do you wonder, not 
merely at brutal violation of law, but at the uttter 
deadness to the sense of law; do you wonder at 
the steadily rising tide of materialism that is 
drowning out all consciousness of things beyond 
the length of the eye lashes and the touch of the 
finger tips? 

I am not willing to believe this spirit of world- 
wide lawlessness that is now abroad is the direct 
heritage of the recent war. 

Nay, rather, [ am bound to listen to the old, far 
question that comes out of this old, old Bible: 

“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the 
righteous do?’ 

When men who by their profession should stand 
between the living God and the spiritually dead 
sinner, men who should cry aloud and spare not, 
men who should tell the truth about the wrath of 
God and proclaim the startling proposition, 
scripturally and intellectually true, that the love of 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 95 


God has been revealed when and where his wrath 
was made manifest; when men whose business it 
is to tell the truth about God, that God can by no 
means clear the guilty, and that the sinner must 
meet this God in His redeeming grace or in the 
judgment that can have no mercy for that unbe- 
lief which, had it the power, would banish the 
Eternal from his throne; when the Ambassador 
of Christ ceases to preach Christ as the Book com- 
mands him to preach, could you expect anything 
else than the spirit of disintegrating unbelief in 
the Church and limitless lawlessness in the 
world? 


Modernism Will Fail 


But although I have spoken of the danger that 
lies in such a book as “The Modern Use of the 
Bible” and the kind of ministry it expresses, I 
have not the slightest fear in the long run for the 
faith of God’s elect, and rest in the absolute assur- 
ance given by the Son of God himself: 

“Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my 
words shall not pass away.” 

It would not be unedifying to recall all the bold 
assertions made by infidels in the past as to the 
ephemeral character of the Book of books, so 


96 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


many of us still delight to call the “Word of God,” 
to recall how their own writings have been put 
amid the dust and worm eaten lumber of forgotten 
things; how the advance with floating banners in 
the name of science, philosophy and new evidence, 
self satisfied assurance that the Bible was now to 
be overthrown and cast from the place of author- 
ity over the mind of man, how that advance 
has been turned into a retreat and even a rout, 
with the boastful banners trailed in the confession 
of defeat, while the ages long and. ever living 
Book has taken on new authority and won fresh 
victory in the realm of faith, and is the demon- 
stration that its words, the simplest and plainest, 
are very spirit and very life; so that, in any 
library where it is placed upon the shelf it con- 
tinues to live when that library turns into a grave- 
yard for any decade old book that has set itself 
forth in the name and claim of science. 

Surely no man will look back upon a world into 
which the Gospel came as the fulfilment of the 
Old Testament, a Gospel, which, according to 
Mark, was “written in the prophets”; no man can 
have the hardihood, I am sure, to believe a Gospel 
of mere ethics, though it were better, even, than 
that of a Seneca or a Marcus Aurelius, a Gospel 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 97 


that confined its promises to the area of this world 
and the life that now is, could have wrought the 
change which the story told by Galilean fishermen 
as well as by men of Pauline culture has wrought. 


An Ethical Christ Not a Saving Christ 


So far as mere ethical teaching is concerned, 
Jesus Christ himself has given a rebuke that 
stands out in definite form on the background of 
the ages. 

Nicodemus came to him seeking a new doctrine 
and looking upon him as the new teacher who 
could give him that doctrine. 

In a very quiet, yet thoroughly smashing way 
Jesus made it plain to this Rabbi that what he 
needed was not a new doctrine, but a new life, 
and that he, Jesus himself, so far from being 
merely a teacher was no less than the Supreme 
Life-giver, he who alone could give that life. 

Then he put the way of getting this life before 
him in such a manner that there was no room to 
misunderstand it. 

He told him the familiar story of the people 
in the wilderness bitten by serpents, God’s 
method of delivering them by causing a bit of 
brass to be made in the likeness of the serpent 


98 A REVIEW OF Dr. FOSDICK’s Book 


that bit them and nailed to a cross, commanding 
all who would be saved from death to look at it; 
and every one that looked lived. 

Like that serpent he was to be nailed to a cross, 
he was to be nailed there in the likeness of the 
serpent of sin that had bitten people, had bitten 
people everywhere, bitten them even unto death. 
God the Father, indeed, would cause him to be 
nailed there and “made sin.” All those who 
wanted to escape from death and get a new life 
that should bring them into saving fellowship 
with God must believe on him on that cross as 
God’s provided way of salvation. 

There were no ethics in that, save the ethics 
of a new life, a new life to be got from a crucified 
Son of God who, when risen from the dead, should 
take his ordained place, not as a remembered 
teacher, a surviving principle or precept, but as 
the immortal Life-giver. 

It was not an ethical Christ that moved the 
world over from pagan self-satisfaction, and self 
blinding philosophy; it was not an ethical Christ 
that turned the world upside down for the natural 
man and right side up for God and his Christ and 
the souls of men. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 99 


It is not an ethical Christ that can do that 
today. 

Not an ethical Christ who passed through time 
and whose vision has been lost on that shore 
where eternity’s waves swallow up all that is 
only of time. 

Not an ethical Christ who passed through the 
portals of death, leaving behind him only the 
echo of his unanswered cry, ‘“‘Why hast thou for- 
saken me?” 

Not an ethical Christ whose preachers preach 
only “the life that now is,” and not a word of 
“that which is to come.” 

An ethical Christ may be admired as the world 
admires a finely chiseled marble statue, but the 
statue neither produces life nor gives warmth. 

Ethics in the name of Christ have been tried 
on the scale of pretentious systems. 

In no garden smitten by winter’s frosts are 
flowers so withered and faded and wholly life- 
less as is the Christ who forms the center of 
such systems. 

Nothing so paralyzes as to set before us the 
work of a Master and bid us copy it. 

Shall we seek to copy his sinless life? 

How guilty of shameless, bitter mockery is he 


100 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


who would suggest it. 

To live the ethical life! 

What is the law of it? 

The law is introspection. 

Well, when you introspect what are your as- 
sets? 

How much capital have you to work cn? 

Introspection—looking within—self analysis! 

That is not the law of the Gospel. 

The Gospel is just the reverse of that. 

Here is the Gospel—listen to it, there is fine 
music in it. 

“Look unto me, and be ye saved.” 

Look away from yourself. 

Look to a Saviour. 

Let yourself “be’’ saved; be the object of salva- 
tion—be saved by a Saviour. 

That, indeed, is the Gospel. 

The thing that moved men, let it be said over 
and over again, was the most brutal thing that 
has ever been in the world, that the world has 
ever looked upon—a Roman cross and a man 
nailed on it—the Son of God. 

The thing that caused that brutal scene to move 
men was not the mere suffering of the victim, 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 101 


the impulse stirred was neither pity nor com- 
passion. 

No. 

The moving forces which came out of that blood- 
red scene was the belief God was there, there 
in all the majesty of inexorable law, and all the 
wrath of his essential antagonism to sin; that he 
was there revealing himself as the God who can 
by no means clear the guilty, and yet there as 
the God who in the midst of wrath remembered 
mercy, the God whose final essence was love, and 
who sought with all the genius of a God to find 
a righteous channel for the outflow of his love 
in saving value to sinful men. 

In that cross men saw, not a spasmodic attempt 
on the part of a crucified man, acting as a martyr 
in the name of man, seeking to change the mood 
of God and make him for a passing moment, if 
not loving, at least, willing to modify his bitter- 
ness against man—No! they saw the love of the 
Son who willingly came out of devotion to the 
Father that he might provide the righteous chan- 
nel which God the Father sought for the in- 
nate love that yearned over men. They saw, 
they were taught to see, not a mere innocent man 
suffering illegally for guilty men, but the God 


102 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


who created a humanity for himself, offering up 
his humanity that, in the reaction of a righteous- 
ness proclaimed, God the Father might still be 
just and yet the justifier of the ungodly. 

That was the Gospel they heard. 

It set their constitutional sin natures before 
them and convinced them that the logic of God’s 
own being’ required their destruction. Then it 
revealed to them the immense sweep of God’s 
love in that he himself by a grace that should 
reign through righteousness had produced a sal- 
vation which glorified his law and revealed his 
love. 

What God was for man and what Christ in his 
blood and his agony translated him to be, moved 
men, moved them to hate sin that at such a price 
made it necessary for such a way of salvation, 
and led them to seek the God who, while he 
hated sin, loved the sinner. 

Think of it! 

A God who could not break his law for love’s 
sake, a God who would not break his law for love’s 
sake, and a Son of God who found a way by which 
the law of God should be honored and become 
the very channel for divine love to flow forth 
legally to men. 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 103 


It is a way of salvation that bears the stamp 
and seal of God from the beginning to the end. 


The Gospel Future 


This Gospel set a future before men. 

Not merely a diaphanous, ghost life that some- 
how, in some way, should “persist” somewhere, 
that neither faith nor reason could find anywhere, 
and, so far as the surveyor’s chain went, was 
nowhere. 


Nothing like that nebulousness. They ex- 
pected, they looked for, something far better than 
that. They expected him who for us men and 
our redemption came down to where we were, 
would come again to finish the redemption he had 
begun, in giving us the body that in God’s origin- 
al purpose belonged to the soul, and without which 
this announced purpose of God would be an open 
failure. 


They were taught to believe God is now, in 
this age, creating a spiritual race of sons of God, 
that these sons, spiritually, are yet in the em- 
bryo state, that at the last and in logical conse- 
quence of his return this race would be com- 
pleted, a race of immortal, God-like men, to 


104 <A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


dwell on the earth as their ordained abode and 
to dwell in it forever. 


Such a Gospel as that has no fear of any demol- 
ishable “framework” in its construction, it is 
strong enough, spiritual enough, loyal and divine 
enough to hold itself intact against any wind of 
doctrine or philosophy that may blow. 


The Need of the Church 


What the Church needs now is to return to that 
Gospel. : 

If there is any withering in the Church today 
it is because of the Christ of mere ethics so in- 
tensively preached to men, the Christ who never 
reaches the cross as the Saviour of men, the 
Christ who never rose from the dead, the Christ 
who instead of calling us to look away from self 
and look unto him as the victor over sin and death 
and the grave, bids us look within and apply his 
earthly precepts and principles, his “ideals” (God 
forgive me for even quoting that dishonoring, 
cheapening, leveling concept; think of it, the 
“ideals” of Christ, just as though he were a mere 
man among men comparing his ideas with theirs, 
his “ideals” with theirs!)—bids us so incorporate 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 105 


his ethics that they may arouse the birth right 
divinity in us, and said to be, like his. 

If there is any trembling, any oscillating, any 
rocking to and fro that seemingly threatens the 
stability of the Church as though the very found- 
ations were crumbling, it is because of the too 
willing Uzzahs who seek to steady the ark with 
their modernistic hands. 


The ark was in peril from the first, not because 
the oxen stumbled, but because neither the oxen 
nor the new cart had any right of relation to the 
ark at all. 


When the cart and oxen were substituted for 
the shoulders of the sons of Kohath the trouble 
and the peril began. 


When David undertook to bring the ark to 
Jerusalem in his way and not in God’s way the 
disaster was ordained and there was no escape 
from it. The substitution of man’s way and man’s 
concept for God’s way and God’s concept in the 
Church and particularly in the pulpit in the proc- 
lamation of a Gospel that is not the Gospel, car- 
ries with it the assurance of the judgment of 
God. 

The need of the Church is to go according to 


106 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’s Book 


God’s mind and God’s way as set forth in the 
Scriptures committed to her keeping. 

The Church does not need the Uzzahs of 
“agreed” scholarship who would steady the 
Church as she faces the science and philosophy 
of the hour. 

The Church does not need men to stand forth 
and apologize for her “framework,” or reorganize 
her thought forms so that they may come more 
fully into agreement with man’s mind and man’s 
thought. 

To discard the First century for the sake of the 
Twentieth and make the Church and the Bible 
conform to that is just of the same wisdom that 
would discard the foundation of a house for the 
sake of the roof. 

Over against all attempt at repair, reorganiza- 
tion or would-be apology for the Church in her 
constitution, her Gospel, and the claimed necessity 
of swinging into line with the march of the twen- 
tieth century toward naturalism under the plea 
of a larger and freer consciousness of God in the 
soul, a consciousness that will deliver the individ- 
ual in the Church from dependence on mere ver- 
balism and deliver the Church from being ham- 
pered and held and made static and frozen into 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 107 


lifeless form by mere words whose content fall 
short of the actual revelation of God in the soul 
today ; over against all this setting up of the will 
of man instead of the revealed and dynamically 
demonstrated will of God revealed in the first 
century in a text form charged with all the vitality 
of the limitless spirit of God, able to thrill and 
surge through the soul in consciousness of God 
with apocalyptic power; over against all this at- 
tempt of modernism, there is the immense declar- 
ation of that Scripture which defines the Church 
for the last century as it does for the first: 

“The house of God, which is the church of the 
living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” 
(I Tim. 3:15). 

It seems in reality a pitiful thing that any man 
calling himself an ambassador of the God who 
created and united to himself the humanity in 
which to meet the demand of his own being 
against the wilfulness of the sinner he would save, 
it seems pitiful when the ambassador of such 
a God is willing to go forth and apologize for that 
Bible which underwrites the Church and under- 
writes the commission of the ambassador and is 
in itself a witness of the creating and ordaining 
hand of God, as much a witness as the Orion and 


108 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


Pleiades he upholds or the cross he foresaw and 
whereon he become the omnipotent Saviour of 
man. 

It is not necessary to defend the Bible, to ga 
out and call in the scientist, the philosopher and 
the historian whose knowledge, with all the ad- 
vance that has been made, is still in the nebulous 
and suggestive, rather than the final and static, 
state. 

It is not necessary to defend the Bible and 
prove that the God who hangs the earth on noth- 
ing, sent horses and chariots of fire to take Elijah 
to Heaven, horses and chariots of fire which he 
himself defines as the colorful and manifold glory 
of the angels which even the most materialistic 
unbeliever is not in position evidentially to deny. 
It is not necessary to go out and seek witnesses to 
prove an iron axe head can swim in water 
as easily (when necessary) even as a machine 
heavier than air can rise any day above the 
clouds and float there as a swan upon the 
bosom of a placid lake; or, that by an X-ray 
we may tell (as the Psalmist announced three 
thousand years ago) all our bones; or, that it is 
easy now to send a whisper round the globe, and 
that men on the other side of the sea may be 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 109 


justified or condemned by their words which we 
hear on this farther shore; or, that out of the 
viewless air we may receive both the words and 
the pictured face and form of those we love be- 
yond our sight in a distant land, with the wide 
sea spread between. This and much more, for 
believing which, fifty years ago, science and ar- 
rogant philosophy and much fuss making historic 
evidence would have arrested all such persons and 
put them in the pillory of intellectual contempt. 

No! It is not necessary to go out and call in 
the mediocre witness of limited human under- 
standing, limited more or less by the age in which 
it lives, to prove the truth of this Bible that over- 
tops the times and with calm, unruffled voice 
tells the facts of history future with the same 
certitude as history past. 

I repeat it is not necessary to defend the Bible. 

Of all things on earth it needs least to be 
defended, demonstrated or proved. 

The Bible carries its own defense. 

It is fully armed and equipped at every point. 

The defense of the Bible is the Bible itself. 

What is needed in the Church in this hour is 
men who will preach the Bible, preach it faith- 
fully, fully, never altering an original word, nor 


110 A REVIEW OF DR. FosDICcK’s BooK 


carrying it around the corner or through a short 
cut from the main route. 

What is needed in the Church is that the 
preacher shall preach it as the infallible Word of. 
God, preach it and not parley about it. 

It is not the unbelief of the world that is hin- 
dering the acceptance of the Bible. 

It is not the new evidence, the new knowledge, 
the new findings of science, none of these things 
is making it difficult for the world and the in- 
telligence of the world to accept it. ~ 

Not at all! 

The talk about a new world needing a new Bible 
or a new interpretation that shall make a new 
Bible out of the Old is at best but unspiritual, 
as it is, also, unintellectual, chatter. 


Why Talk about a New World 
Needing a New Bible? 


Where is this new world needing a new Bible? 
What is so new in it? 


It is a question that is coming up on the lips 
of men. 


I repeat the question and I ask myself, What 
is so new in the world? 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” lil 


Children are still born at the risk of a mother’s 
life. 

In spite of every invention disease still outruns 
the last edition of Materia Medica. 

The surgeon’s knife still finds, not only the old 
gangrene deep seated in the flesh, but deeper still, 
the old sin, the old shame and the incurable re- 
morse. 

What is there new? 

Men still laugh, and swear to hide a groan. 

Pleasure still fills the cup to the brim and then 
leaves the dregs of old weariness and the deep 
disgust of sated lust at the bottom of the cup. 

What, really, is new? 

Men still struggle against inherited appetite 
and passions, are possessed by them as by very 
demons and at last are dragged down by them 
into the whelming misery of moral helplessness 
and despair. 

Talk about building a new world? 

Why, the old acquaintances meet you at every 
turn, in the same old clothes, in the same old 
fashion, doing the same old things, and doing 
them in the same old way. 

The old acquaintances—the familiar forms. 

There they are—sin, shame, red-faced and 


112 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S BooK 


never satisfied lust, hungry greed, slimy, serpent 
like falsehood, the cowardly, crawling, innuendo, 
the faint praise that damns while it praises, brute 
selfishness that would sacrifice the dearest love, | 
the thirst for gain that will drink at every foun- 
tain fair or foul. 

A new world, you say, needing a new Bible, a 
Bible fitted to a new world? 

Why deceive yourself? 

The old cannon, the old bombs, the old torch 
are all here and the old wer is harnessing itself 
for a fresh welter of blood that it may revel 
in it as it has done ever since the impassable sky 
looked down on the first murder nearer to God’s 


environment by some thousands of years than 
now and upon the first war inspired by the same 


wild beast that still lurks in the lair of the same 
old human heart. 

No! I say it is not a new world demanding a 
new Bible, rather it is an old world needing an 
old, old Bible. 


The Opposition to the Bible is Not 
from the World 


The opposition and hindrance to the Bible, I 
assure you, do not come from the world. Itis not 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 113 


the world out there throwing stones at the Bible 
and seeking to stifle its full message. There is 
doubt out there and sorrow and perplexity and 
natural unbelief, but there is no organized effort 
to throw the Bible down into a discount of open 
contempt. Instead of that there is a willingness 
to listen to any comfort the Bible can bring, to 
any relief to the ulcer on the shoulder where the 
burden rubs the hardest. 

The hindrance and the opposition come from an 
entirely different direction. 

They come from the theological seminary, the 
theological seminary whose professors have for- 
gotten (if they ever knew) how to read the old 
Bible, and read it in the old way. 

They come from the pulpit, pulpits that proclaim 
themselves modern and new. It is the unbelief 
of the professor and the preacher, tempted to play 
the role of the prophet to a so-called new age. 

It is a profound mistake to think such an at- 
titude is intellectual. 

It is not particularly so. 

The most intellectual, as it is the most honest 
and the most loyal, attitude for the Christian min- 
ister, is to submit his mind to the Bible (if he 
undertakes to preach it at all) as the written 


114 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’S Book 


Word of God, and take it as it comes to him, in 
the assurance, if he will compare Scripture with 
Scripture (not with science and new philosophy) 
he shall see light in God’s light, and be able to. 
give it undimmed to others. 

Let the preacher preach the Bible as the Word 
of God and the Blood of Christ as that chemistry 
of infinite love by which, though sins “‘be as scar- 
let, they shall be as white as snow; though they 
be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” 


The Great Opportunity . 


There never was an hour when a greater op- 
portunity was offered to a preacher to take this 
undying Book, expound it, expose its content, re- 
veal its beauty, stir the mind of men with its 
matchless wonders, fill the soul with its Heaven 
bequeathed peace, let its music play upon the 
heart chords, let the grip of its power hold men 
back from the edge of the downward plunge, and 
by the gentleness of its touch lead the spirit up to 
illumined heights, let it paint the glories of the 
delectable mountains, show the Way that leads 
to the opened gates, to the city and the throne, 
and where he sits bearing the marks of the 
wounds he got for the sake of sinful men, allow 


“THE MODERN USE OF THE BIBLE” 115 


it to demonstrate itself to the intellect, the con- 
science and the heart. 

In their strange demand for liberty to think 
independently of any textual or ritual trammels, 
preachers fail to search the Book for itself and 
thus discover the liberty of the Spirit, the real 
freedom which is willing and glad, “not to think 
above that which is written.” 

It is evident enough that no self-respecting 
man would be willing to prove his statement 
true to him who should rudely, violently, take 
him by the throat and demand it; rather, he would 
resent such violence and keep his secret. 

When men come to the Bible with the speech 
of suspicion and accusation on their lips and rank 
and cynical unbelief in the heart and clutch it 
in the grip of a defiance that says: ‘‘Prove to 
us you are telling the truth, prove it by the 
standards we set up for you,” could you expect 
it to do anything else than to keep its silence and 
withhold the illumination it otherwise is ready to 
give? 

What an opportunity then to stand forth, take 
the Book at its own value, and wait for the re- 
sult. 

He who stands, holds in his hand and discusses 


116 A REVIEW OF DR. FOSDICK’sS Book 


the quality and value of a seed while summer 
days are passing and the inviting soil still waits 
to receive it, is not wise; but wise is he who casts 
in the seed and finds in quick result the truth of 
all its claims. 

Let the preacher preach the Bible with the un- 
shaken conviction that it is the very Word of God, 
the message from himself; let him preach it faith- 
fully, insistently, above all the noise of contend- 
ing hours, and he will see the same result as all 
the passing centuries have revealed, the calling 
out of the elect and chosen ones in whom faith 
is the gift of God and in whose soul the fruitage 
of the Book will make manifest that it is, indeed, 
as the Apostle with challenging note has said, 
“Not the word of men, but in truth, the word of 
God;” that Word of God which still gives its un- 
modified command to every true ambassador of 
Christ: 

“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a 
workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly 
dividing the word of truth” (II Tim. 2:15). 


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